


What Happened That Day Whilst He Was Away

by Transistance



Series: Each Disquieting Instance [4]
Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Animal Death, Blood and Gore, Caretaking, Loss of Control, Major Character Undeath, Medical Inaccuracies, Memory Loss, Other, Reapers, Self-Mutilation, Undead, Violence, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-18
Updated: 2016-03-23
Packaged: 2018-05-21 13:26:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 34,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6053247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Transistance/pseuds/Transistance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>William is out of the office for a three-day meeting in Ipswich, leaving Grell as an acting supervisor of the London Dispatch. Nothing can go wrong.</p><p>(Rated purely for violence/gore, prior knowledge of the overall series isn't imperative although might help.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. London

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, let's be clear about this if the tags aren't enough warning: this is not a nice fic. This is possibly the nastiest thing I've written, in terms of gore? Violence? That sort of thing? Almost every chapter should have a warning for one form of violence or another, so be wary of that.
> 
> If you like William, do not read this. He draws more of the short end of the stick than he deserves and dies horribly. This was written in direct retaliation to the load of you lot who have written short pieces in which exactly two things happen: a) Grell dies and b) William mopes about the death, my train of thought being essentially _this is the last straw, someone needs to even the field out a bit here_. 
> 
> Sorry.

“There's something in the grounds – there's an intruder in the grounds!”

This particular terrified announcement came from a very flustered junior reaper and was delivered to a very idle Grell Sutcliff, whose boredom vanished immediately.

“ _Ooh_ , is there? Come _on_ , spill the beans – what is it? Mortal, monster, soul snatcher? _De_ mon?”

“No – I mean, maybe – I don't know, sir – ah, I mean ma'am, sorry – I don't know!! I just saw them when I was arriving – I was late – saw this figure in the distance – blood everywhere – I think it was an undead!”

“You're babbling, dear, calm down.” In spite of saying this Grell was very much intrigued, and uncrossed her legs from their position on the desk to address the junior properly. What was his name again? Simmons, maybe. She decided that Simmons would do. “Tell me what you saw again, but _slow_ ly.”

Simmons took a very deep breath, and released it in exactly the way she had just told him not to. “I was just walking and I saw it walking too and I thought it was just someone else who was late but then I actually looked and it was limping badly it had blood everywhere it looked like it had been cut open or something I think it was a man but I couldn't be sure and I called out to it to ask if it needed help and it stopped, and it just _looked_ at me it didn't say anything it just stared, and stared and stared and it was all beaten up and I don't think it understood me so I ported straight here, ma'am.”

“...Alright. Thank you for reporting this, Simmons. I'll go out and deal with it straight away; don't worry.”

“It's Samuel, Senior, but cheers. Sorry to bother you.”

“Nonsense, it's your job to report things like this. Shut my door on your way out, please.” She jumped away before he could answer, moving instantaneously from her own room to just outside the front of the office building, materializing her scythe as she landed. It was very rare to get undeads in the reaper realm, but when they did get through they were remarkably dangerous. It would not do to have one running around unchecked.

It felt remarkably freeing to be able to make decisions like this; as Will was away and their secondary supervisor was on sick leave, the reins of power had been very reluctantly handed over to Grell for a brief span of time. She had never wanted a supervisory role, because it limited the amount of time she could spend on collections – but it gave her an excuse to do even less paperwork than usual in spite of the increased workload, and when interesting things like this happened it meant that she was the first to be told.

Sweeping the area once revealed nothing suspicious; stepping out further into the courtyard allowed a much better view of the surrounding area and revealed the trespasser immediately.

It was not too far away; an upright, humanoid figure, wearing a dark suit that was, as Simmons had said, absolutely drenched in what appeared to be its own blood. It was limping badly, but definitely making a determined line in her direction. She couldn't make out its features; a wound on its skull had obliterated the colour of its hair and the shape and overall colour of its face, but it did seem very pale. That made sense, she supposed, if it was an undead.

Light glinted off its face and Grell felt her heart skip a beat. Glasses? But it wasn't a reaper – it couldn't be. Nobody was missing, and anyway a reaper would just jump back to the dispatch rather than walk. Or even more likely jump home, clean themselves up, and then come back into work to report whatever incident had come up.

The figure edged toward her, and she realized why its gait was so familiar; it walked in the same mindlessly stubborn way that the zombies on the Campania had. Definitely an undead, then – but why was it here? The ones she personally had encountered before had been doctored by the Undertaker, but he very rarely ventured into this realm. There were other ways of conceiving a zombie, too, of course. Old magic, certain types of physical mutilation, or being bitten by one created from either of the former methods. Hopefully this was a source zombie rather than a bitten – because if it was someone who had been bitten, that meant that there could be any number of others. Just one she could deal with easily.

It had meandered closer whilst she had been considering it, and Grell took the time to look at it more closely, and was rewarded with a single sharp jolt of horror as its face became recognizable, even caked in blood as it was. It was the one face she would always recognize, anywhere, because she loved him.

_No._

The zombie stopped moving, leaving about six feet of space between them, and raised dead eyes to appraise her.

“Guh... rell. G _hh_ rell.”

She couldn't hear it. She couldn't hear it, because to hear it would mean that this creature knew her, and to acknowledge that this creature knew her would confirm it to be Will.

This was not Will. This was not Will because Will did not walk on legs that were twisted almost beyond use; this was not Will because Will did not have a laceration wider than the span of his hands from one shoulder down his chest, or a seeping crater in his temple, gore spattered out across his suit and face. This was not Will because Will was not _dead._

Eyes so dull they were almost grey stared madly out at her from behind splintered glasses, chest barrelling in and out in deep, laboured breaths (but breathing meant he was alive, surely, in spite of his injuries? He had to be alive). And he took one more wavering step toward her, and she took one more wavering step back.

“Guuuuhrellll,” he hissed again, throat rattling over her name as though it were a foreign word to him. “Sut _cliff_.”

He raised one hand, slowly as though reaching for her, and she stepped backward again, swinging her scythe up in defence. Oh, he looked harmless now. Broken and harmless and sad. But she knew how fast these things could move as soon a they were given the opportunity to do so; knew that if she let her guard down he would be upon her in seconds, teeth at her flesh attempting to tear her apart in the same bloodthirsty manner as whatever had got him had done. He was not Will, not anymore. He was a mindless monster, and someone would have to put him out of his misery before he could do any damage. 

If she pretended she didn't recognise him, it wouldn't hurt.

The zombie stopped moving towards her quite suddenly, and to her surprise narrowed its eyes and hit its own chest with the hand. “W- _ill_ ,” it said, as though it thought she didn't recognise it. “ _Speee_ -ars.”

They weren't supposed to recognise themselves. It was not uncommon for the undead to respond to the things around them – or to remember names, and faces, and use their familiarity to lure people into a false sense of security – but they were not supposed to retain a sense of self.

Grell lowered the chainsaw, very, very slowly. “...Will?”

“Ips _wich_!” he snarled, but made no move toward her. “Ipswich – dead – _trap. Dead_.”

She let the chainsaw disappear.

William had been away for a three-day meeting in Ipswich - a meeting attended by the majority of supervisory collections agents in the area. It was an annual thing, and he had not been due back until tomorrow. It was routine; he was supposed to be _fine_.

“..All of them?” she asked, quietly. “ _All of them_ are dead?”

“Disssspatch gone. Dead. All of... us, dead. I. I-- _III_ , am... dead. Came... Warning.”

“Ipswich – the whole dispatch -”

“DEAD!” he repeated, shouting the word as though furious with her. He lunged suddenly, the movement horrifyingly brutal, and she raised her hands instinctively to shield herself from an attack that never hit. The zombie's legs had given way, causing him to sprawl at her feet.

“Dead,” he muttered from the ground, and then lay very still, the movement of his back as he breathed the only thing to suggest that he hadn't finally expired. Grell bit her lip, and then knelt beside him.

“I'm going to take you to your office, okay? Then I'll contact someone from Upper Management, and they can decide what to do about Ipswich. And... you.”

“Dead,” said William, very quietly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (If you like pathos zombie stories - I'm defining that as anything in which zombies are characters rather than mindless dangers to the cast - and are looking for good things to read, may I recommend _The Girl With All The Gifts_? It's beautifully written (present tense 3rd person from several very different viewpoints) and follows a traditional zombie-apocalypse-style England with the twist that the party of non-infected humans have collared and tamed a bunch of zombie children for research purposes, one of whom is the protagonist. It has solid science behind everything, mixed in with references to Greek legends and that sort of thing, and a stunning ending that is absolutely not happy but quite a bit better than a happy ending could be in that scenario.)


	2. Ipswich

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning for heavy violence, beware

He had arrived outside the building housing the Ipswich Dispatch offices at the same time as every other attendee did – bang on nine, having taken the train to the town's mortal side overnight and jumped from there. There were about a hundred of them – one or in some cases two from each office, spread across England – and they waited in a patient mill outside the building for fifteen minutes before the silence became unnerving. 

They all knew each other, vaguely. None of them were newly promoted and all had attended these meetings almost annually without fail, so it was no surprise to anyone that Collins was the first to get bored and Fraser the first to back him up. Mannering erred on the side of caution, pointing out that there should have been _someone_ about – it was the start of the day! No office could have no stragglers whatsoever – which put all of them on edge. MacGregor suggested that the office had had a power failure or other such accident, or that it had been vacated in favour of holding the meeting more privately. Thompson disagreed, declaring wildly that something must be seriously wrong, and that they should all leave it, immediately. Thompson had been absolutely right.

Spears had put forward the suggestion that the Ipswich Collections administrator – one Keagan – simply ran an organized office but had forgotten to send someone down to collect them, and was otherwise busy. If there was something wrong, he rationalized, they should investigate it anyway, and file a report.

In less than half an hour he would be wishing more than anything than he had agreed with Thompson, but because none of them could predict the future the group nodded and agreed and jostled each other to enter the building first like frightened children. Franklin pointed this out, in the quiet manner he had, and the administrators unanimously calmed down and Coates pushed the front door open.

The power was out, and MacGregor and Thompson both immediately declared “I knew it!” before being hushed by their more nervous peers. But the windows were large and let in more than enough light to see by, illuminating the foyer. It was silent, still as death, with nothing to indicate any wrongdoing other than one single upturned chair against the far wall.

“Hell _oo_ -? Is _any_ body _in_ here?” White called, and Tarn elbowed him hard in the stomach. “Shh!”

As though in answer, there was a muffled crash from the room above them. Every supervisor simultaneously looked up to frown at the ceiling and then down to frown at each other, disquiet spreading through them like poison.

“...I'll go up and see what that was, shall I?” suggested Thwaites - the youngest and always most eager to prove himself - and was gone before anyone could stop him.

He did not come back.

England's finest collections agents shuffled their feet and eyed each other, waiting for someone else to speak.

“Oh, for God's _sake_! Come on, there's dozens of us – whatever's up there can't take us all. Clearly we need to report this – but if a hundred reapers can't deal with this you know as well as I do that Upper Management isn't exactly going to send more than this. Come on, we have to deal with this _now_.”

That was Morrison – always too sure of himself. He was the first to die, excluding Thwaites.

But he was right, really; nobody could have expected that one hundred agents would not be enough. Ironically, their downfall was that they were _supervisors_ – out of practice on the field for the most part, often having not had to fight for a soul in years if not decades. Most of them had never worked in a group not consisting of a singe partner to whom they had previously been coordinated with, and given the enclosed space and low light they were at a definite disadvantage to being on the field.

But they were grim reapers, and whatever monsters had infested the walls of their own would suffer the same disadvantages as they would, surely. One of their offices had been taken and Thwaites was gone and they, as a single-hearted unit, could not allow that to stand.

Each reaper summoned his scythe, their company immediately becoming rather more pointy and dangerous, and William used his to absent-mindedly push his glasses up his nose. The tension in the air was thick and nasty, and nobody wanted to be the next to speak; so they fell back on simple hand gestures, a query as to whether to take one or both staircases, and whether the threat was likely to be limited to a single floor or the entirety of the rest of the building.

 _Both staircases_ was the decision, to tackle the threat on two flanks. _Focus on the first floor_ was the second, _and work our way up_.

It was an efficient plan, and it should have worked.

William was in the group that took the left staircase, trooping up it in their organised and weaponized mob; they marched in a unison that caused their footsteps to echo and rebound back on them, effectively preventing all external sound from reaching them. This oversight did not cost them anything other than peace of mind, in the long run, putting them all on edge. Those in the centre of the group suffered it worst, unable to see ahead or behind, surrounded only by the drumming of feet that carried word of their presence up to whatever waited above.

They reached the first floor without incident, the darkness of the stairs banished once again by the windows of the long office room. Strangely, every blind in the room was drawn, shuttering the sunlight into paper-thin slits and dousing the room in a grey murky indistinguishability that rendered everything into solid blocks of black and grey. An expectant silence held.

It was a moment before the other group emerged from the cavernous stairwell at the far side of the room, and Dawkins took the opportunity to open one of the blinds, brightening their corner of the room. Spotlighting it.

The sunlight did help, a bit. It illuminated the upturned desks and the papers that flooded the floor, many of them spattered in red. “...Paint accident?” someone suggested hopefully from the back of William's group. 

He turned to frown at the offender out of habit, and so missed Morrison's death completely. But in fairness Morrison _was_ all the way over at the other side of the room, heading the right staircase group, so it would only have been very hazy shocking violence anyway.

He did hear it, though. A mutter of recognition, a faint “What's the meaning of all-” and then a cry of alarm, then pain, and then a very clean _snap_.

And then the room was in chaos.

The other group sprang into action immediately, of course, because they had just watched a man die. But William's group were still unaware of what and where exactly the threat was, and so moved forward toward the sound of their colleagues' suddenly panicking shouts, and the whirrs of motorized scythes hacking into flesh. They could make out the mass of movement on the other side of the room but no individual forms could be picked from the hoard.

A scream from behind – from the reaper closest to the stairwell that they had just exited (Johnstone?) - and then the rear of their own group were shouting, moving, and suddenly some of the noise made sense.

_“Zombies-”_

_“Undeads! They're undeads!”_

_“Destroy the brains, that's the only way-”_

William had never had the misfortune to actually come face to face with a zombie – in truth, almost none of them had – and so wasn't entirely sure what to expect. Something rotten, he supposed, with broken skin and bare bones and with no aspect of humanity left.

He heard it breathing before it emerged from below a desk, the first one, and spun round to stare into the shadows that concealed it. They would have walked right past it – which meant that there could be more, he realized at the same moment that three darted out like shadows from the dark and bowled into several of his peers, knocking them to the floor and tearing at them with a savagery more likeable to beasts than men. But the one under the desk took its time to come out. It extended one pale hand into the light fist, chipped nails painted with crusted gore, and then very slowly stood and stared at him, a half surprised recognition in its streaked face.

“Spe... Sp _eeee_ ears,” Keagan croaked, ruined head tipped to one side. One of his eyes was gone, gouged out, leaving a ghastly hollow in his face and drenching it in the brownish red of dried blood, and the other was dull and unfocused without its glasses. One arm hung uselessly at his side, and to William's horror, his innards seemed to be _gone_ – a black cavity sat in their place, glistening in the low light.

“G _ooooo_. Go. Go! Go _go go go GO_!” The creature that had been the Ipswich collections administrator gestured wildly with its working hand in the direction of the door and then moved faster than should have been possible, jerking toward William with a low shout, its jaws wide and expression blank. It would have killed him then and there if Harrison hadn't reacted faster, ramming his scythe – a rake – through what remained of its chest, stopping it dead.

Keagan turned, very slowly, face twisted into something like affront, and William took the opportunity to behead the creature before it could attack again. It died with a sigh, dark blood from the severing of its neck spilling out over the blades of the shears as its head thudded nastily against the ground. Harrison yanked his rake out of the body and said incredulously, “These things are-”

William never found out what exactly Harrison thought they were, because a dead secretary took that moment to fling herself onto Harrison's back and sink her teeth into his jugular.

This was unfortunately not the first time William had been sprayed by the blood of a dying colleague, but it was the first that said colleague had been positioned badly enough to stumble at the impact and crash straight into him, knocking him down and pinning him under the soon-to-be corpse. Harrison struggled and cried out as the thing on his back ripped bleeding chunks from his neck, bestowing upon him the sort of injuries that a reaper would not survive even without the added vice of zombiism. He was a larger man than William, crushing the other supervisor under his weight as his death throes were abruptly cut short as the woman tore out his larynx, and William felt the warm wetness of the man's open throat pooling against his cheek.

Harrison's body spasmed quite suddenly, knocking the breath from William as the undead woman scoured at the flesh on his back. Her hair fell over the newly deceased's shoulder, matted and dirty against his skin, and he stopped breathing in an attempt to get her to believe him dead. 

She paid him no attention, gouging herself on her victim's flesh before Robertson appeared from the side and put a pike through her head. Perhaps in retaliation to this Robertson received a fist straight through his abdomen, bursting through him with sickening ease courtesy of a skinny zombie who had risen up from the floor like a snake. William watched him fall, and fought to free himself of the weight of Harrison's corpse.

The noise of the fighting had changed, he noticed. There was less coherent shouting and a lot more incoherent screaming of those who had fallen and were in the process of being eaten, as well as the grunting and snarls of the undead themselves, who suddenly seemed innumerable. _God, this is their entire dispatch, isn't it? Every single individual who was stationed here. All dead._

The thought was terrible, and William realized suddenly that this would not be dealt with through destroying each individual zombie. The whole place would have to be completely razed – there was no point in so many of them losing their lives here in a futile effort to control the population of undead. They had to get out.

 _Get out_ was what he would have liked to shout, or possibly _jump away, save yourselves, report this_. Unfortunately the words came out as a groan, because he was still pinned under Harrison and the room was full of noise anyway. They were all going to die. Every supervisory agent in England was going to die, all at once, in this room.

William dug his elbow under Harrison's stomach and attempted to ignore how limp he was, heaving the body away from himself and pretending he didn't hear the slap as it hit the floor.

And then he was upright, scythe in hand, and the zombies were upon him before he had the chance to jump. Three of them came at him, a fourth making a move only to be engaged by a reaper rendered unrecognisable by blood, and the duality offered by a scythe that was essentially a double ended spear was suddenly remarkably useful. He flicked it through the neck of one easily before running the other through, which was a mistake because a zombie's midriff was not a weak point. The thing grinned horribly at him and dragged itself toward him along the shaft of the scythe, disallowing its removal. But the fourth zombie's opponent had dealt with it and switched targets to come to William's aid, shoving his scythe – a strimmer – through the zombie's head.

The creature's skull exploded, and suddenly everything was red.

“Ah, shit,” the reaper muttered, and only then did William recognise them as Tarn. “Look, we've got to get out of here, we need to go.” 

He punctuated this by disposing of the last immediate threat in much the same way as the former, and William nodded. “Jump-”

Something slammed into him from behind, and his head caught against a corner of something very solid, splitting against it. The pain was blinding and indescribably potent, and William lay dazed as something dug into his shoulder – that couldn't be a hand, nobody had the strength to put their hand straight through flesh – and ripped him open.

That had been the point where he had lost consciousness – so, looking back on it, that had probably been the point where he had died.

* * *

He wasn't dead now, though. Or at least, he was, but not in the conventional sense. Not even in the reaper sense. He had stood up the next morning to find himself rather world-weary and physically wrong, but had come to the conclusion that he was damn well going to report this even if nobody else was.

The other creatures in the office - those poor sad remnants of men and women like himself - showed no hostility on his departure. So he had walked and walked, without stopping, with a sort of relentless determination that two crippled legs would not prevent him from covering the eighty miles between Ipswich and London. He had found that he did not hurt, and did not tire, and did not think about anything much. He just walked.

He was tiring now. Three representatives from Upper Management had arrived very quickly at Grell's request, along with one woman from Special Affairs who claimed to specialize in “accidents” like this, and now they sat on the other side of a table, just out of his reach, asking him questions over and over again. Grell was leaning in the corner of the room, looking mildly distressed.

 _Keep Grell safe_ , said the part of his mind that was William. _He is probably the only thing standing between you and immediate dissolution._

 _Kill Grell and eat him_ , proposed the part of his mind that was definitely not William, in a way that made it sound entirely justifiable. _Then maybe kill yourself. Dead anyway._

“Do you know who did this to you? Mr Spears?”

The woman was talking again. He shook his head at her. It was strangely difficult to get words out in any exact order; his throat felt constricted, his mind fuzzy. “ _Every_ one dead,” he stressed, trying to make her understand that there had not been just one zombie to blame. There should have been a source creature, but he was almost certain that they had all been contagious. 

“And you believe that the majority of your... group, you think that they remained in the building instead of leaving as you did?”

William shrugged. How could he know what the other undead would have done after he had left them? There was every possibility that they would have followed his lead and attempted to return to their own dispatches, to warn their superiors about Ipswich. But they had shown no signs of doing so whilst he had been there.

“Could you give us a list of the places that might be at risk of having someone like you return?”

Good, finally an intelligent question, even if difficult to answer. “Bir...ming-ham.” Robertson had been fine the last time William had laid eyes upon him, the hole through his torso not affecting his ability to stand. “Lut _on_. Do...ver. Cambridge, Oxfo...” No, Thwaites had not survived. William remembered stepping over the mutilated corpse, desecrated too badly to even consider revival. “... _Not_ Oxford. ...Most.”

“Okay.” Two of the men exchanged a glance, and the third spoke up. “And were they like you? Could they think?”

“Yes.” Absolutely, yes. From the moment that Keagan had told him to go and the moment he had left, he had always been aware that they could think. Their quiet wailing echoed in his ears, the mourning of monsters that didn't know how to live with themselves. “Ipswich – think.”

“The ones you encountered in Ipswich were sentient? Even though they... attacked you?”

“Y _es_.”

The tallest of the managers nodded, and the Special Affairs woman scribbled something down in her notepad. “You are aware that we shall have to refer you for termination?”

William nodded, and was surprised when Grell protested.

“Wh _at?!_ You can't! He hasn't done anything wrong, he's the _victim_ here-”

“He's dead, Mr Sutcliff. He's _un_ dead. He's a danger to everyone around him.”

“You're wrong!” Grell was clearly incensed by the notion, and looked as though he might attack the man. “Will wouldn't hurt any of us!”

 _You are an idiot, Grell Sutcliff._ William could hear their heartbeats, hear the blood pounding in their veins and for the first time in his existence he _wanted_ Grell to come closer to him; he wanted the red reaper close enough to smell the life under his skin and to taste his living flesh as it was torn from his body-

The zombie managed to rein in this train of thought before it consumed his mind entirely, and realized that he had missed something that the woman had said. “Spears?” she asked. “Would that be okay?”

“...Re...peat?”

“I said we cannot afford to lose so many officers – a whole branch – and given that you have retained at least some aspects of humanity, we should be focusing on helping them, not destroying them. I want to run tests on you.”

 _Oh. Of course._ Yes, she was probably correct. William inclined his head again, and out of the corner of his eye watched Grell put his hands in his hair and attempt to pull clumps out by the roots.

“It isn't _fair_ , he hasn't done anything _wrong_ -”

“ _Grell_ ,” said William sharply, and then shook his head at him, hoping that he would get the message and stop embarrassing himself in front of Upper Management. Grell narrowed his eyes, and then flounced right out of the room.

This meeting concluded, William found himself restrained and moved to what appeared to be a sub-level of the Medical department. It was clean and empty, and he wondered if he would expire here.

The woman introduced herself as Helen Davies, and informed him that she would not do anything that would hurt him unless he broke loose, in which case she would terminate him. That sounded fair. (He could hear her heart beating, beating, and wondered if it would be worth it.) She also informed him that she had a team of juniors helping her, and that they would be in and out periodically. And then she left.

William strained slightly against the restraints, more to test them than due to any real desire to escape, and then lay back on the bare platform he had been left on. He felt as though he should feel helpless, or maybe upset with the situation as a whole - but he felt nothing.

The zombie closed its eyes and tried to forget.


	3. Blue

Grell was very surprised to find that she retained her status as a temporary administrator despite the knowledge that William would almost certainly never relieve her of the post (and that fact hurt more than anything she had ever experienced, because she knew he was still there; behind his wounds and his mask of indifference he was still himself, still Will) and even more surprised to find herself dragged into meeting after meeting on the topic of Ipswich. London had sent pigeons explaining the situation to every other branch in the country, and every other branch in the country had sent pigeons back, and then representatives.

Plymouth wanted to destroy the office at Ipswich; burn it to ash to prevent the danger from spreading. Brighton disagreed, saying as the Special Affairs woman had that they could not afford to recreate an entire office. Manchester suggested that they attempt to retrieve the undead with minimal risk to living reapers and take them back for study. This idea was chewed over at great length but eventually concluded it would be the best – _if_ there was no risk whatsoever to the retrieval teams. This was when Lancaster spoke up, citing the information that had been given about William's physical state, and suggested that they gas the place.

It was a novelty to them all that zombies, for some bizarre reason, needed to breathe. Needed it with an intensity that no living creature did; maybe it helped in place of a heart. But reapers didn't. So, Lancaster said, raising his eyebrows and spreading his hands, pump the place full of a chemical concoction that would put the recipients out cold, portal in, collect the bodies, portal out. Ferry them back to London – the largest facility available – and bring in medics from around the country to try and save them. Post agents in the surrounding area to attempt to pick up any zombies who had strayed from the office.

This sounded watertight, and they were all impressed. Grell resented the obvious implication that any offensives had to be tested on Will, but was fully aware that they had no other choice. She had been denied entry to visit him and could only take Special Affairs' word for it that he was okay, and it was killing her - metaphorically, at least.

The day that they chose to conduct the raid was quiet and blue, and three hundred and fifty reapers of medical or collections personnel waited silently outside the building, praying that the gas would succeed. They were to work in small groups of ten; one scout group, first, just to check, and then twenty groups that were to jump in, grab a body each and jump straight back out until the building was cleared. There was to be no bloodshed, no loss of life. The medical staff would assess and confirm that each body was undead, or even just dead – it had been judged that remains would be as useful as the mobile ones for identification purposes – and they would all be taken mortal side, to the train which they had successfully bargained to use for the day, and handed over to Special Affairs' medical group.

It was a desperate attempt, and they were all aware that there was very little chance that these creatures would survive.

The bright, cheerful sunlight had actually turned out to be a distinct disadvantage – every time a reaper jumped in or out they were blinded by the intensity change, and none of them were prepared for how creepy the place was due to the lingering contrast-sourced darkness, even when they had thrown open every blind. Similarly none of them had been prepared for the amount of residual violence that pervaded the place – the streaks of blood across the walls and the puddles of cold gore on the floor and the pieces of bodies that, if one were to squint and turn their head on its side, might be an arm or a leg or a head...

None of them had been prepared for how peaceful the undead looked, silent and lacking the malevolence of wakefulness, their rasping breaths the only sound as their colleagues moved amongst them and picked them up one by one, and carried them off.

It was disquieting for a number of reasons, and there was an instinctive desire to remain speechless whilst they worked. Grell counted herself lucky that the blood didn't bother her; that the mutilations were trivial in comparison to some things inflicted by her own hand's past, and tried to ignore the aspects of the mission that did.

It was the ones under the desks that she didn't like.

There were a lot of them, pressed as far back as they could go, their arms wrapped around their faces as though they wanted to hide from the world, to never look upon the light of day again. At first glance she had thought that they might be alive, hiding from the carnage of the undead in a desperate bid for safety, but after lowering herself down to pick one up she found out how wrong she had been. The dead reaper's head lolled back as she cradled them and jumped out, revealing blood, blood, blood on its teeth, plastered around its mouth, up its forearms and hands. Grell remembered William's insistence that the Ipswich zombies were still capable of thought, and the way that he had lunged at her when he'd arrived, and felt sick.

Some of them huddled together, arms hugging others' heads to their chests, faces buried in sticky hair, and prizing them apart was sometimes difficult because it was not always obvious whose limbs were whose.

Grell decided to stick to taking the things she was sure were dead, that the others were reluctant to touch. Disassembled parts, several headless bodies. Several bodiless heads. Some of the corpses had scythes stuck through them. Some of them were still breathing.

They had no idea how many bodies were pulled from the wreckage scene – nobody stopped to differentiate between those who still retained an aspect of vitality and those who had been torn apart, souls lost to death. Nobody knew if they had a chance of saving half a dozen or a thousand, and nobody had the time to care. Jump, take a body, jump, hand it to the medical team, jump, repeat. It took them half an hour before the building was judged clear, and an hour after that the three teams who volunteered to scour the building for anyone else returned. Ipswich's dispatch office was lit and burned to the ground, three reapers volunteering to stay to watch this to completion.

And then they returned, each patrol back to their own dispatch, and tried to forget Ipswich. Nobody spoke about it on the journey back to London, the living reapers stationed in the furthest back carriages of the train. Nobody spoke at all. They just glanced at each other and then at their feet, horrified at the destruction that their own kind had wrought upon themselves.

Their arrival back was a quiet affair; the bodies were moved as quickly as possible, split into those that were probably zombies and those that were definitely not. Special Affairs had a surprisingly large number of small cells in their department, which the undead were placed in, several to each. The severed pieces and ruined bodies were left with Medical, the unpleasant task of attempting to identify them looming in the near future. Some of the remaining office staff came out to help, or watch, but the majority covered their mouths and turned away in the face of the carnage.

And finally Grell was allowed to see Will.

It was after every other undead had been moved, after word had got around that they had been successful; after Ms Davies had concluded that she didn't need to hold him as a solitary curiosity given the sudden plentiful supply of subjects. She ushered Grell in, murmuring information.

“We've been feeding him through a drip because we don't want to encourage his undead side to become more dominant – he has refused the normal foods we have offered - and we figured out why his voice was so bad; his throat was swollen, but it reduced quite quickly so he can talk a little better now, but still seems to have trouble fully putting thought into words. He's still sentient, still intelligent – on some days he can hold a conversation – but he is dead. His body is deteriorating slowly but surely and his sense of touch is almost non-existent, and his hand to eye coordination is very low. We haven't had him out of the restraints – he says he doesn't know if he would hurt us.”

The room was white and silent and much like any other medical room, with the exception of the restraints on the bed and the slightly out of place monitors on the wall. They beeped periodically and after a moment she realized that they were recording their patient's breaths.

_Will._

His eyes had flickered as she had entered the room, and now he watched her, gaze impersonal and piercing. But it lacked the derision that it was usually so full of – his eyes weren't cold. They were just dead.

They had cleaned him up, she saw, and nicely, too. A shirt covered the strike across his chest and the hollow on his skull looked almost old, the skin puckered and pale around it. She tried to ignore that it had not closed at all; that the delicate pink of raw flesh could be seen within. She focused on his face instead, and tried to be herself.

“L _ook_ at you, darling, all tied up. If I'd known that was what you were into I'd have changed tactics _years_ ago! I trust they've kept you well? Fed you, en...tertained you?”

He frowned at her, holding a silence to allow her to fully absorb the disapproval in his face before he simply said, “Don't.”

A fully blown reprimand would have pained her a lot less than that single word. She pulled a face at him, hoping he wouldn't see through the mask to her pity, her heart-ache. Because it _hurt_ to see him like this – it hurt to know that the man she loved would almost certainly never be a man again, that he was so close to losing the aspect of himself that made him a person. He would never see the office again – never see the majority of their colleagues again – never be seen as anything more than another test subject, another irreparable has-been...

She turned to the nurse, full of her own distress, and asked without thinking, “What are you going to do with him?”

Davies looked uncomfortable, and glanced at William before answering. “Well, he'll not be kept here like this anymore. We'll house him with the others, and keep him alive as long as possible. His wounds aren't as bad as some of them – I think he'd have a shot at survival, if we could revert the underlying infliction. We'll monitor his health, just like the rest, and test whatever we come up with in terms of 'cures' on him. But...” she leaned forward to whisper to Grell, voice low enough to be unheard by her patient. “In reality for most of them I don't think we'll do more than provide the function of a hospice, essentially. Even if we can find a treatment that works, the majority of their wounds are too bad to survive, even with our healing ability and medical technology – some of them are festering already. We will look after them until we figure out how to let them die, because we cannot allow undeads to remain here, and we cannot hold them here indefinitely.”

Grell nodded slowly, understanding warring with indignation within her. So many reapers – so many _people_ – were going to be shut in cages like test animals for the rest of their days, with no control over their situations, nobody to help them. Nothing to look forward to but a final death. Will would be here, alone in the company of the dead, staring at four white walls until he passed away.

She couldn't allow that.

“I don't suppose there's any chance that I could... aid you a little in that purpose? Take one of our burdens out of your hands, hm?”

Davies looked at her.

“It would be very irresponsible and inadvisable for you to do so. He is dangerous, Ms Sutcliff – he could turn on you at any moment. Outside of attacking you I doubt he is capable of doing much other than loitering around your home. You will not be able to be physically close to him without huge personal risk, but...” She stopped, sighed. “If you can tell me that you can _guarantee_ that you will take the necessary precautions and not let him harm you or anyone else, then I have to concede that it would be a much more... humane way of existing than what the others are going to get. As long as you tell me if anything about him changes, I will turn a blind eye if you want to take him and go.”

“What, now?”

“Whenever you want.”

There was noise from the other side of the room, and they both turned to look at Will, who was scowling. “ _Sut_ cliff,” he said, rather pointedly, the familiarity of the annoyance in his tone unspeakably wonderful. Grell laughed and swept over to him, ignoring the warning from Davies, and knelt beside the bed.

“See, you're fine! As put out by the prospect of spending time with me than ever. But come _on, darling_ , it'll be _fun_. This is the sort of quality alone-time that we haven't enjoyed together in years!” His frown deepened, and she pouted at him, changing track.

“Don't look at me like that. I'm trying to _help_ , Will. It's not as though I'll even be in so often – I'll be at work a lot of the time, because _I've_ been saddled with _your_ long hours.” As soon as she'd said it she realized that it had been a bad point to mention, and hurried to cover the mistake. “You have to stay somewhere! This is just giving you somewhere to _be _for a while. I won't hurt you and you won't hurt me.”__

__He muttered something unintelligible, and she moved closer to hear him better. “What?_ _

__“M _ight_.”_ _

__“No, you _won't_. You can't. Even if I didn't trust you not to lose _control_ of yourself you forget that I am remarkably adept at swinging a _chain_ saw around – and whilst I would so h _ate_ to be the one to thrust an appliance like _that_ into you, it is a safety net that I don't think you'd be able to break through. So we're good.”_ _

__He still looked unconvinced, but made no move to stop her as she started to remove the restraints. “I'll not keep you like this at home - unless you _want_ me to, of course – so you'll have to behave, right? No biting. ...I never thought I'd say that to _you_.”_ _

__William sighed, a horribly heartfelt noise, and she took him home._ _


	4. Red

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for excessive residual violence

When he had woken up, he had felt nothing.

It had been a very different sort of nothing than coming round after his first death (God, but it was strange to be able to say that. First death, second death. The third loomed in the future, inevitable now in a way it had never been in all his years as a reaper). That had been quiet, only a faint stinging in his eyes and an overall sense of peace to suggest that anything had changed at all after taking a bullet through the mouth. But this time it had felt as though there was something _missing_.

There had been no pain. That surprised him, because all he could remember was pain. His head should hurt, and his chest should hurt, and after a moment of internal self-assessment he decided that his legs should probably also hurt. It took him a moment to remember who he was – _William T Spears, London Dispatch Collections Administrator_ – and a moment more to remember where he was. _Ipswich_.

All dead.

He had tried to open his eyes at this point and found them sealed shut, either like an infant or a man who had suffered a heavy scalp injury. He decided that he was the latter, and tried to raise a hand to wipe at his eyes. The right didn't want to move at all, but the left seemed to work, and he tried to coordinate it onto his face, which was much more difficult than it should have been. Limp and useless, he managed to remove his glasses mostly by fluke, then tried to clean his face. _Talk about impaired vision now_. It felt as though the blood had managed to pool in his eye sockets, which wasn't a pleasant thought.

It was around that time that he had heard the wailing.

The noise had been in the background since he had regained consciousness, but it was quiet – so quiet. A thin, high sound, made by several voice and clearly rooted in utter desolation, it made his heart ache with an empathy he hadn't known he possessed - providing the secondary realization that his heart was no longer beating, which confused him for a moment before he dismissed it as unimportant. The sick, grieving cries took priority.

Forcing his eyes open revealed a world full of blurry grey shapes, and he was strangely relieved to realize that his eyesight was as terrible as it had always been. He replaced his glasses over his eyes, only jabbing himself with the limb once, and the room took on some definition.

William sat up.

At first, instinct told him that there was nothing alive in the room, in spite of every other sense informing him otherwise. He could hear them, see them moving, and yet every part of his mind told him that he was alone. So he ignored that particular sense, a used the more familiar five instead.

Four and a half, maybe. His skin felt as though it had been numbed, culling his ability to sense through touch.

The room was dark, a single rectangle of light burning the far end, and he remembered the blind being pulled back, the faces in the light. He remembered the screaming, the god-awful sound of people being torn apart. Yes, that was what had happened.

It had been so busy. The zombies had been everywhere, with the addition of the hundred of his own, and now they seemed to be gone, at first glance.

He knew they weren't gone because of the noises they were making, full of shame and hurt. There was one, a young woman with one arm, sprawled back against the wall of the office with her face buried in her own elbow, weeping.

He wondered dispassionately what reason she had to cry.

A step behind him made him turn, slowly, and there was Robertson. Dead, clearly, his chest ruptured, his glasses gone. He looked down at William with a forlorn recognition in his eyes, and then bent down slightly to offer his rather damaged hand. William took it and just held it for a moment, a hazy uncertainty preventing him from being sure of what to do, but then Robertson pulled, weakly, and together they brought him to his feet.

A wave of dizziness hit William as he stood, and he tried to stop breathing to circumvent it, but found that for the first time in a century the lack of oxygen made his head pound. So he simply closed his eyes and let it pass, and tried to adjust to the sudden loss of balance.

He looked down at himself in an attempt to find the source of this, and then looked up again immediately and pretended he hadn't seen quite so much blood. He should have expected it, given the state of Robertson and the amount of it on the floor and desks around him, but it was still quite a shock. He couldn't remember the last time he had been injured so badly.

Robertson's dead gaze hadn't left him, and William found himself wondering who was in charge here. Were any of Ipswich's managers still intact enough to function? Did they have any cause to? Was Robertson looking at him as a colleague or a food source?

Another question occurred to him, and he tried to ask it aloud. “Diiiii...” Oh, that wasn't good. “Diiiiiid, any...”

Robertson's mouth twisted into a sympathetic grimace, and he interpreted the question correctly. “A...live? Ussss?” He answered the question with a shake of the head, and spread his arms. “Dead. All... dead.”

It was less shocking than it should have been. In truth it didn't even feel like a particularly important revelation – what was one hundred less collections administrators in the grand scheme of things, really? _Quite a lot_ , the bit of his brain that had asked about managers informed him. _Upper Management is going to go off their heads when they find out about this._

How would they find out about this if everyone who knew about it was dead?

William met Robertson's eye again and felt an epiphany hovering in the near future. “Why... them. Ipswich. _Cry_ ing.”

Robertson shrugged, and then gestured to himself. “Guilt. Gr...ief. Dead.”

William glanced around again, at the the damaged bodies of the keening reapers, and wondered how it felt to have killed someone of their own kind. To see them primarily as prey and secondarily as a person, and then be forced in the aftermath to look upon them again and know that you had cursed them to the same suffering as yourself.

He resolved not to find out.

And with that thought, he had realized that something had to be done. Ipswich was a danger to the reaper world – even he himself, probably. How difficult would it be to control himself around living beings? Would he retain any sense of self at all, or would he go berserk, indiscriminately bloodthirsty as the inhabitants of this office had been? Would he have the foresight only to shout a warning, like Keagan, only to be put down before he could do any damage – or give any warning?

William havered, then nodded a farewell toward Robertson and began to walk.

The Ipswich zombies became apparent as he passed them, crouched under desks as though hiding, leaning back against walls as though lost. One of them lurched upward and caught his shoulder, bringing its face horribly close to his own to breathe, “Sorry... _Sorry_.”

He made for the stairs at the far end of the room – some morbid curiosity compelled him to assess the situation in its entirety, catalogue the forms of the fallen in his mind. There was Ashton, reclining against a desk, clearly blind, the upper half of his face having been gouged clean away. There was Fisher on the ground, chest heaving in-out-in-out as his body attempted to deal with the trauma of having been ripped in half. His legs were nowhere to be seen, but his entrails replaced them like tail, twisting out behind him. One of the Ipswich men knelt beside him, crooning apologies, crimson face twisted in distress. 

Hill's corpse was in pieces, throat and stomach lost and life lost with them. Harrison sat with his back to the room staring at the wall, and William felt compelled to touch his shoulder as he passed. He turned, neck lax, and caught William’s wrist for a moment in acknowledgement of the wordless apology. Thompson's head had been removed cleanly, as though one of the live reapers had concluded that it would be a wiser move to destroy the zombies before they revived if they had been bitten – or possibly made a mistake. Mannering lay face up on the ground, frowning gently, three of his limbs in tatters. Franklin stood with his shoulders hunched speaking – or at least trying to speak – to several of the Ipswich zombies, who were gesturing animatedly in place of words, frustration clear on all of what remained of their faces. One of them had no jaw. Coates sat against the wall, a red smear showing the path he had dragged himself long only to expire at the side of the room.

He found the remains of Thwaites spread in the space between two desks, and attempted to bypass them without stepping in any of them. He failed.

Morrison's body was awful. It looked as though his neck had been broken first, but his chest had been split open and the entire contents of his rib cage removed. Needless to say, he was not moving.

White lay in the corner, an impact against a wall having cracked his skull open. Fraser stood motionless, a mess of gashes in his back, head swinging to follow any movement in the room.

Collins was in the stairwell – or at least, most of Collins was in the stairwell. It looked as though he had been the most successful in trying to flee before the two zombies who had caught him had torn him limb from limb. The culprits lay together, one still and silent and the other with its eyes hidden in the palms of its hands, speared on either end of Collins' scythe. The latter looked up sharply as William passed, revealing the streaks across its bloodied visage.

A single figure stood in the foyer, hands clasped behind its back, staring out into the sun. Its silhouette disallowed much recognition but did profile the severity of its injuries; most of its left side between the ribs and the hip were gone.

It turned its head and nodded at William.

“Dead,” Tarn remarked.

“...Dead,” William had agreed.

* * *

And now he was here, and Grell was trying to pretend that nothing had happened. That William was the same as he had always been. And perhaps, to Grell, there was little difference. (William knew that was a lie because he saw the tiny cracks in Grell's composure every time he looked at William, that ever-so-tiny flinch as his eyes caught again on the tell-tale wound on his scalp. But he told himself it anyway because it allowed him to hate Grell, which was helpful because he needed something to hate now other than himself.) 

They were in Grell's house. It had been a while since William had had to come here, and he hadn't particularly wanted to return – both for reasons of safety and personal dignity. He didn't want to owe his subordinate anything. (But then again he wasn't Grell's superior anymore, was he? Grell occupied his position at work and he was dead.) It wasn't as though the other reaper could exactly cash in on it. One of them would pass on long before he would have any chance to.

It was becoming difficult to hold down trains of thought for any length of time, which was an unpleasant feeling. And he had lost control when he had arrived back, too – he had actively tried to kill Grell. It had been the first time he had been close enough to a living reaper to smell their blood, feel the pulsing of their heart in a way he was now deprived of, and he had finally understood exactly what the Ipswich zombies had gone through when a hundred bright lives had wandered straight into their domain.

 _That's past_ , he told himself. Whilst he had been in the Special Affairs' ward he had felt no desire to attack anyone, presumably due to the constant nourishment supplied through the drip, and had let their heartbeats fade into a soothing background rhythm, reminding him of what he had had so recently.

_I was alive._

The concept seemed so alien.

Now, out of that quiet room, he was beginning to feel the first pangs of hunger again. They were not sharp, nor quite painful – they were similar to what he had experienced in the first few hours after waking. But he could hear Grell's heartbeat when he was nearby, and had a subtle urge to get up and wander until he found it again when he was not. But he didn't say anything to the red reaper – his custodian now, dear god – and made the effort to ignore it. 

He had only been here a day, and already it felt like it had been eternity. Had there ever been a reaper named William T Spears? He didn't know. The past stretched out behind him, elusive and likely to dissolve if it were to be touched, but the future seemed equally intangible. If he had lost so much of himself in a day – a week since he had been killed, then – what would he be like in a month's time? A year? He thought it unlikely that he would survive a year, and stopped considering the future.

The creature that had been William learned to stop considering a lot of things as time went on.


	5. Green

It was very, very strange having Will living – or almost living, at least – in her house, and not entirely pleasant. If she'd ever been informed in the past that he would share her flat with her she'd have been primarily incredulous and secondarily overjoyed - but now, as she endured his cracked speech and shark's gaze from eyes closer to granite than emerald, she wished he had somewhere else to go. That would let her forget – and to forget, even for a second, would be bliss.

The first night had been the worst. She'd locked her bedroom door, inherent caution managing to take precedence over her trust in him, but she hadn't actually expected him to do anything other than lie in his designated room – the spare, which was small but habitable – even if his affliction prevented him from sleeping well.

It had been a few hours past dusk when she had heard the footsteps in the hallway, and sat bolt upright in her bed. They dragged, horribly, and Grell felt her heart rise to her mouth as the shuffling came closer and closer to her door and then stopped, right outside. She could - _god_ she could hear him breathing then, each gasp ragged and uninhibited by any notion of staying silent, and she had no idea how long he'd stayed there for. Longer than it had taken her to fall back into a restless, dreamless sleep, waiting for the noise of the handle to be tested. Perhaps he was trying to listen to her as intently as she was listening to him.

In the morning she found him curled up on the couch, head buried under his arm and several pillows, and when asked he informed her that he hadn't been able to sleep at all and wanted to be left alone. 

It wasn't the first time that she had been relieved to go to work, but that was still rare enough that had the situation not been what it was she would have called it a novelty. The day went by slowly, hours of leaning back on chairs and trying not to see the paperwork whose signatures should have been black, not red, and when Ronald stuck his head around the door a little past eleven to ask if she was okay she almost bit his head off, in the non-literal sense.

The coffee that obviously resulted from her junior's concern tasted off, and Ronald tried to make small talk after she'd made it clear that large talk would get nowhere. Grell found that she didn't have the energy to lie so decided to not talk at all on matters of any importance - but Ronald Knox had been in her retrieval group, the day before; he'd seen Ipswich himself, and knew what monsters preyed upon her mind.

The younger reaper took her hands in his own across the table, looked her in the eye with a seriousness she hadn't known he possessed and tried to make her swear that if she needed any help with anything, she'd tell him. Grell laughed him off and wondered how she'd missed the realization that he had at some point matured.

It was difficult to excuse herself on the basis that she had work to be doing, more because they both knew that although that fact was absolutely true she was an individual who would go out of her way to avoid such tedium, but perhaps something in her eye or tone conveyed just how little she wanted to talk, and Ronald caught the hint in both hands and let her be. Or perhaps he just didn't want to linger under the drapes of her muffling despondency for any further time out of his day. Either way, Grell was left alone again, in the office room that wasn't hers.

There was a carefully worded invoice on the desk from Davies, requesting that she run some enquiries by Will when she returned home, if he was willing. Grell read through them and then tore the paper up. As if William were some lab rat to be tested on, a set of results waiting to be graphed! But in spite of this indignation, she decided that it wouldn't hurt to follow the request through – Davies wanted to help, after all. And it wasn't as though this could make Will any worse.

For the first time in her life Grell worked overtime specifically to avoid going home. As the hours trudged on, however, it became clear that even the increased workload could not keep her mind from straying for long, and eventually she abandoned all hope of clearing the pile and simply made her way back to her house. 

Procrastination decreed that she didn't simply jump back, so she started out to walk the distance. Down the stairs, out of the building – she was easily the last there, the encroaching fingers of dusk having led every other worker away some time ago; the few specific night-shift reapers would file in soon – and then onto the street, which was just as quiet. Her heels provided the only clear noise; sharp clips cutting though the smog-like air as she moved, purposeful to the last. It wouldn't do to be caught out in the dark.

Grell passed the black maw of the entrance to the park, and stopped.

The trees beyond those wrought iron gates rustled in a breeze she'd barely felt and for a moment they sounded like whispers, the bent branches beckoning her forward into the greying gloom. She didn't like the park – full of mud and grass and little else it served an almost entirely aesthetic purpose to the realm – but quite suddenly her head was full of memories instead of worries, and not Will. Or at least, not _really_ Will.

 _“Thank you for the day, Grell Sutcliff.”_

He had been an innocent, and he had died. Will was not quite such an innocent; perhaps that was why he was still breathing. Did it hurt, being an undead? She would have to ask.

The image of the android's head falling from his shoulders before his body crumpled after it wormed its way into the forefront of her mind, buried as it had been under months of careful avoidance, and Grell felt sick.

Would William die like that? Guiding her hand – wishing for any end? Or would he cling to life for as long as was possible, striving to strike though the boundaries of inevitability, longing for one more day, one last chance to see the sun?

Would he still be sentient at all by the time his bodily decay caught up with that of his mind?

She turned away from the black gates, that iron-gilded expanse of grey-blue and recollection, and went home.

* *

The rattle of a key in the lock was the first indication that Grell had returned, almost certainly late – it was past dark now, long past, which meant that the day had ended and Grell should have left the office hours ago, didn't it? William was almost certain.

William was almost certain about a lot of things. He was almost certain that he was dead, in the same was that he was almost certain that he was still alive, in one sense of the word. He was almost certain that he could be more useful doing paperwork than lounging about uselessly in his previous colleague's house. He was almost certain that Grell was still deserving of his scorn.

Almost certain.

“I'm hooo-oome! _Darling_ , where are you?”

The same exuberant, creaking voice that had tailed William for almost a century echoed round the flat, bright and false. It still amazed him that so many artificial emotions could be injected into vocality, milking the voice box to produce an apparently effortless stream of high notes punctuated with staccato drops, but there Grell was, tiresomely energetic as always.

The red reaper rounded the sitting room door and William watched the tiny slip up in the smile, the momentary fear in the eyes before they brightened again.

“Oh, _there_ you are. I hope my absence hasn't been too painful? What have you had to do to occupy yourself all day?”

He grunted in answer, deciding that the question merited no further exposition. He had done nothing with the day; slept, awoken to find himself alone, explored the house in an absent and disinterested sort of way, and then stared out of windows until the dulling of the light had become too much even for reaper eyes. It had felt like solitary confinement, and he had resolved some time before Grell had sauntered back in that he would need to find something productive to do if he was to stay here indefinitely.

How to articulate that request?

“Grell... Paper. Please, brih... Bring paper.”

“Paper?” Red eyebrows raised, but thankfully the appeal wasn't questioned. “Do you mean actual paperwork? You want to fill your time here doing _filing_? Or do you just want blank paper?”

“Ei... ther. Both.” Paperwork would be helpful to do for his ex-colleagues– who knew what sort of state the office was sinking into with Grell in charge – but blank paper would be... freeing, he hypothesized. Finer motor controls or not, he was fairly confident that he would still be able to write.

And if he could write, he wouldn't be forced to speak. His mouth didn't seem to want to communicate anymore; he found himself trying to form words that he couldn't remember how to pronounce, and the dry sandpaper rasp of his windpipe scratched against his efforts to output syllables. It was incredibly frustrating.

Grell only nodded, perhaps having reached the same conclusion. “Yes, I'm sure I can get those for you, if you don't mind waiting until I come back to you tomorrow. And I've got... books, and things, which you're welcome to, of course. My humble abode is your own, as they say.” It was a friendly formality, and they both knew it. The subject matters of the books that Grell owned were not the same as the books that William read.

Had read. He doubted, somehow, that he would read much again.

It was nice that Grell was making the effort, anyway. It was more than he would have done had their situations been reversed.

The red-head had caught a strand of that vivid hair between two fingers and was now twirling it, gaze turned inward as though it was possible to avoid meeting his eyes forever. “Speaking of paperwork... I was asked to ask you some questions. Would you be okay with that? They're from Ms Davies – do you remember her?”

William wondered if that was the first question, but nodded anyway. “Fine.”

“Okay. Great. They're all simple, really, nothing to fret over... The first one's just 'what is your name'?”

He hoped that his lack of words would not be considered an inability to answer. He could feel the name on the back of his tongue, but it did take a moment to recall exactly how to move the letters from his mind to any externality. 

“I, am... W _iii_ lliam. Spears. _Tee_ Spears.” There. That had gone better than expected.

Grell obviously thought so too, mouth splitting into a wide, relieved grin before the next question was asked. “Good. Right. What was your position at work?”

And so on and so forth. It appeared to be a test of simple memory, and to his own surprise there were no obvious obstacles in his head. One or two names were missing, and his memories of some past meetings were hazy, but overall all seemed not too bad.

Then he was asked about Ipswich and his mind shut down and retreated into the furthest corner of his skull, away from that unspoken accusation hidden behind those twin copper suns. The red monstrosity before him was a stranger, an orchestrator of some strange incident behind glass doors and could not be allowed to know what he had become. Dissolution awaited the reaper who was a danger to his own. Dissolution awaited the reaper whose own were not other reapers.

The heartbeat in the chest of the creature who must wish him dead increased, a little, almost unnoticeably; could that be the faintest trace of fear appearing at their core, in answer to his sudden silence, in answer to the inherent truth that he was nothing that should be allowed to breathe, to see, to look out on a world full of life and wish only to consume-

Thud, thud, thud, said Grell Sutcliff's heart, and William wished his fingers didn't itch to stop it from beating. Those picturesque eyes were far too wide – how many people had they looked upon with such aching pity? It terrified him to be beheld in such a way by _him_ , her, them, Grell; his inferior equal, this outspoken stranger and alienated friend, his predatory defendant; an honest liar and a faithful whore, loving not-lover and abrasive inconvenience of parodied weakness and collateral strength; this straightforward mess of simple paradoxes who wished him close enough to touch but not to see, wished for him to have a voice but say nothing that he meant, and whose eyes were green, green, green -

William looked away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On the image "twin copper suns" - copper (the metal) burns with a green flame.


	6. One old friend

In spite of everything, the second night had not been anywhere near as bad as the first. William seemed to completely shut down when asked about the events at Ipswich in spite of his ability to discuss them with Upper Management before; he'd terrified her in how still he had become, and then seemed not to hear her as she'd asked if he were okay, over and over again. Eventually Grell couldn't take his silence anymore and told him she would take a jaunt out to somewhere mortal-side for dinner, assuring him that she would return in an hour or so in spite of the underlying guilt at leaving him alone again so soon. If he'd understood he made no sign of it.

When she jumped home again, sometime past ten, she found him standing in the spare room – which was his room, technically, although he seemed happier to avoid its use whenever possible (perhaps out of perversity alone) – facing the window as though staring out into the void would allow him to see anything. He turned upon hearing her behind him and she caught a fleeting glimpse of some unreachable emotion behind his hollow gaze before he adjusted his glasses with one hand (fingers fumbling very slightly, such a hauntingly familiar movement marred by the inexact error) and resolutely refused to meet her eyes for the rest of the night.

He appeared to be asleep when she left for work again the next morning – curled up in a tangle of limbs on one of the armchairs, a decidedly uncomfortable-looking way to rest – and she paused at the door of the living room for a moment and just watched him breathe. His face was almost entirely concealed by his arms, themselves covered in the ugly pin-stripe bed wear that she had decided previously not to question, but the mess of his dark hair could be seen escaping the confines of the cloth. So different from his usual painstakingly neat comb-back, she could no longer even say that it made him look younger; it hid the crater wound on his skull, which was a blessing, but it fell lank and unruly in a way he'd never let it when they had been juniors. It didn't make him look younger – it just made him look haggard.

But he breathed even if his heart didn't beat, and she wondered if he could still dream.

* * 

It was difficult to acclimatize to waking up so late, even now. Eleven a.m. saw William's eyelids flutter and then open and close more deliberately once, twice, three times, blinking the sleep from them – not that he knew that so much of the day had passed the moment he regained consciousness. It had been the irregular pattern of 'day's and 'night's in Special Affairs that had managed to knock his well-worn sleep-cycle loose, and the creeping insomnia that caught him in the evenings now did nothing to help him regain it. It would definitely have been an annoyance had he had anything to do with the day ahead. 

But as it was he had nothing, so allowed himself to just lie for a while, staring into the soft edge of his sleeve – blurred both as it was so close as to be no more formed than an indistinct haze and because his glasses were on the table rather than his face – before unfolding himself from the chair and cracking every joint he could. He heard the slight pop of each, but didn't feel a thing.

The zombie stood, hands out on each side to steady himself, and sank down to his knees almost immediately to retrieve his glasses from the table. Everything sharpened quite considerably as he put them on, but they did not remove a residual dimness from the air. He hoped it would clear as the morning progressed.

He couldn't hear the heartbeat and it took him a moment to place what this information meant. Grell must have already left for work – although that was hardly a surprise; half the morning was gone. The silence was very welcome, and for a moment he simply closed his eyes and revered the absolute stillness that pervaded the whole flat.

He was hungry.

This realization forced his eyes open hard enough that the snap should have been audible, unsettled into an irrational distress. He needed to _eat_ something, but he hadn't eaten since before this particularly bloody reincarnation and had no idea what concoction they had been pumping into his body to keep him sustained in Special Affairs. There was a mild desire in the back of his head – somewhere within the unfathomable curtain of globular thoughts that had no place in his skull, but had made it their home anyway after the rot had set in – to acquire something that moved; something that would squirm and struggle as he tore into its flesh with his teeth, sinking them deep into that gorgeous wet warmth that he no longer possessed.

For a single moment the image of Grell's vivid heat overcame him, an ambiguous noise of pain or pleasure escaping her as he held her close and buried his mouth into her jugular, both of them together lathered in her favourite colour as blood spurted from whatever disfiguring wounds he cared to create, borne forth by a heart that still beat on, fast, fast as he ripped into her-

William blinked again, and shook his head. He was not going to harm Grell. Grell was his colleague and in some more indistinct way his friend, or at least a useful ally. It would be remarkably short sighted and treacherous of him to turn upon her. He would simply ask her to bring him food – she'd know what he could consume, surely, even if he himself didn't – and be satisfied with whatever came of that.

Yes. That was what he would do.

Reaching this decision felt good - _I am in charge of myself; I am still in control_ \- and for a time he was content with it. However, as the day wore on, it became steadily more difficult to ignore the turgid aridity of his mouth and the thundering memory of the rhythm of Grell's heart. His mind could follow the trail of patters it had produced in his time in her domain; how even its tempo usually was, smooth and background, and how it jolted ever so slightly when she saw him, how it had sped and fluttered on the occasion that she had jumped home, and how it had slowly increased, climbing steadily as though creeping uphill, on the first night. He shouldn’t have frightened her, he knew, because it was a dreadfully undead thing to do, loiter at people's doors in the dead of night – but he had been drawn to her heartbeat like a light, courtesy of this strange sixth sense. At that moment, sightless in the dark and deaf to all but the life in her body he hadn't even wanted to hurt her in any way; he had only leaned his head against the wood of the door and listened. Thud. Thud. Thud, thud, thud thud thud thud-

He wondered vaguely if hearts could burst, and then dismissed the notion as unimportant.

It was some time before Grell arrived home – an hour, a day, a month, a century; did it matter? - and as soon as he heard the door he was on his feet, awaiting her. She could bring him ~~a heartbeat~~ a food source.

She'd barely dropped the stack of paperwork and papers on the second chair before he addressed her, eyes fixated on her face.

“G...rell.”

“Yes, darling?”

“F _ood_.”

She raised her eyebrows at him, looking surprised. “Oh... yes, of course. Sorry, I forgot you'd need to... Sorry. I'll see what I've got.” A slight disquiet flickered across her face for a moment before she turned with no apparent hesitation and made her way back out of the sitting room, moving through into the kitchen. _No, you don't have anything edible in there._ He trailed after her as though on a leash, footsteps haphazard and slow, and watched her kneel down to peer into the fridge.

“I've not got much in; do you want me to-”

William spoke again before she could finish, having moved very close to her neck; the overwhelming urge to smell her skin dug at him as he let the syllables drip from his tongue and wished he couldn't hear his own carnal desire that filled the word.

“A _live_.”

Grell jumped away just before his teeth met her skin.

* * *

She hadn't moved with any particular destination in mind – other than _away_ – and found herself in one of the market streets of mortal-side London, where she took a moment to stand and consider the situation. Will wanted food. That was fair. It needed to be alive. That was less fair.

It wasn't that she was squeamish about the idea of him killing things – no, if anything it made him very much more attractive, in some bizarre way – but it did make everything slightly more hassle to arrange. She hoped he wouldn't only eat people – the trouble they would both get into for that would be _enormous_ – but what else would sate a zombie's appetite? Would any creature with a heartbeat do? For a moment Grell was very tempted to bring him back a pigeon, to see if his fondness for them would best his hunger, but decided against it. That would be cruel.

There were... animal shops and things in the mortal realm, weren't there? Pet shops? That would have to do. She was not about to go out and raid a farm to find sustenance, even for Will.

Finding a shop that sold live animals took longer than she had anticipated, and worrying over the time made her forget to worry over her appearance. The teeth, Grell realized later, were not appreciated in a shop full of small fluffy animals. Her stunning crimson mane probably wasn't either. Nonetheless, purchasing a rabbit was easy – the shopkeeper looked very scared, and mostly as though he wanted her out of his shop as soon as possible – and the guilt she felt as it sat warm and content in her arms was only minor. “I'm sorry, buddy,” she murmured before jumping back to the relative danger of her house. “It's for someone else's good.”

By the time she returned Will was gone from the kitchen – he had returned to the couch, and sat with his face in his hands, an unexpected picture of dejected unhappiness. But when he heard her arrive his head snapped up, eyes wide and fixated on the small life in her arms. 

His gaze flicked up to meet hers for a moment before he nodded at the creature and said, “...Thank... you.”

“It's no problem, darling. Anything to keep you happy.” Actually getting it across to him seemed a problem, though: she had a horrible mental image of attempting to simply place it on his lap, and finding his teeth in her before she could pull away. His expression suggested that he knew this too – so after a moment's thought she placed the rabbit on the floor, hoping that it was docile and wouldn't dart away, and backed off.

To her surprise William did not rush at it, or make any particularly violent gestures at all; he coaxed it closer to him with his hands and then scooped it up onto his lap, taking care to ensure that it would not fall before looking back up at Grell.

“Out.”

She blinked. “What? Why? Come on, it's not as though I haven't seen worse things than this! I've _done_ worse things than this! Will-”

“ _Out_ ,” he repeated, in a voice that brokered no argument. Grell deflated slightly.

“...Alright. Fine! Where do you expect me to go?”

“Out,” he said again, with a slightly different inflection. She stuck her tongue out at him in a pointlessly childish manner before jumping again, back into the mortal realm.

Once again her warp core took her somewhere unexpected, which she hadn't realized she wanted to visit until now. It had been a while, hadn't it? Since before the sick reaping on the Campania; possibly even before she had killed Madam Red. 

He had attacked her, sure. Meddled with the very nature of life itself; a blasphemy for a reaper. But surely if anybody could help in this situation it would be the Undertaker? He had created undead from scratch, imbued them with a new life instead of a mockery of their own... Surely the creatures like Will would seem simple in comparison to that, wouldn't they? And he would help his fellow reapers. She would _make_ him help them.

Grell kicked his door open with more force than was necessary and called his title before he had any chance to greet her in his usual creepy way. “Undertaker! I know you're in here.”

This was, in matter of fact, a lie. She had no idea whether he would be at home or not, or even if he had returned here at all after going AWOL and under the radar after the last run-in with Dispatch. The coffins lining the walls of the funeral parlour were as cobwebbed and fusty as ever, and nothing stirred the stale air other than her own suddenly fragile breaths.

Turning on her heel to leave was the catalyst for the laughter to start, that all too familiar dry cackling clearly uninhibited by any pleasantry such as sanity, echoing about against the stone walls and giving cause for some of the liquid in dark jars on the shelves to shake. It continued slightly longer than could be considered polite, as it always did, and eventually the old deserter did emerge from one of the coffins in the far corner.

“Well, heh heh... If it isn't the red reaper. Had some fun last time we met, didn't we? I hope I didn't scar your pretty self up too badly. What can I aid you with today, hm? Need a box fitted out for anyone? I remember doing up your lovely Angela – ha, what a mess you'd made of her! I had to-”

“Stop it!” She wouldn't usually snap at him – as a being who was both very dangerous and very handsome indeed she felt she should be more inclined to flirt with him more than anything else – but she couldn't forget those tired grey eyes, seeming older in her mind's eye even than the spring-green pair hidden by the curtain of ash hair before her, and so this encounter was business, not pleasure.

Grell wondered if the intense memory of the feeling of that stone, dead stare crawling across her skin would ever ease enough to allow her to feel pleasure properly again.

The Undertaker's head lolled slightly to one side, a mad grin plastered from one unseen ear to the other. He laughed again, attempting to stifle it with one hand, and swept toward her. “Not here to reminisce, then? But isn't that what funerals are _for_? You'll be trying to tell me you're not here because of work soon, either.” The last sentence followed a sudden drop in tone and Grell realized that he was threatening her in spite of the mannequin grin still stretched taunt across his face.

“I'm not. I need your help – you know about the dead. You know about _un_ dead.”

A breath hissed out from between the Undertaker's teeth, and he managed to keep his composure enough to only release a single soft chuckle before replying. “I do, that, yes; certainly I do... Not as much as there is to know, you understand, but certainly a bit, yes. But what would a pretty, fliting little thing like yourself want with such an indelicate subject as that? Something personal, I assume? Heh.”

Grell hesitated; almost backed away. Could she trust him? It was no concealed matter that he didn't hold their kind in particularly high esteem; that life was an experiment, not a contest. What if he betrayed her? What if he refused to help at all – or made things worse?

“Do you remember – Will? William T. Spears?”

“That young man?” Surprise coloured his voice, and Grell had the feeling that he'd raised his eyebrows behind his hair. “Your supervisor, isn't he? Stick-in-the-mud, stick-up-his-arse kind of a guy?” The high giggle that escaped him was short and almost giddy. “Dearie dearie me, how on earth has _he_ managed to get himself entangled in living corpses? Wasn't attempting a resurrection or something, was he?”

“No. He's dead.”

“Well, we all are, aren't we?” She saw him bite his lip, heroically keeping his mirth hidden this time well enough to add, “But I assume you mean it in a more permanent term this time. I am sorry. It's more unexpected for reapers, isn't it – but I can't help you. I can't bring him back, you know, in spite of anything you might've seen or heard. Can't be done.”

“No, that's the thing. He's not gone. He's undead – he's a zombie.”

“He's a-?” This proved the breaking point. The Undertaker leaned forward as though wracked in a spasm, retching his shrieking hilarity forth. One arm scrabbled for purchase against a coffin to hold himself up by; the black nails scuttered against the polish of the impervious wood as he sank down to the floor, slowly, howling. His hand slapped against the coffin even as his choking bursts of mirth seemed to suffocate him, tears half-visible streaming down the sides of his face in the mad obscene humour that he had entangled himself in. “I'm – sorry – sorry, my dear Sutcliff, I can't help myself – it's just – don't you see? Spears was – practically – a zombie – anyway! With a personality like that – I'm surprised – you noticed - a difference! Hahahahaha!”

“It's not just him!” she snapped, incensed by his complete disregard for any level of seriousness. “An entire dispatch was affected – we've got hundreds of reapers rotting away in their own skins up there and you, with all your arcane knowledge and experience in these things – all you can do is sit there and laugh!”

The noise stopped abruptly and the old man looked up.

“...Alright; I've stopped laughing. What happened?”

Grell found herself scowling at him and attempted to school her expression before explaining the situation as concisely as possible as the Undertaker picked himself up from the floor.

“Ipswich, you say?” he murmured once she had finished, voice suddenly distant. “...Oh.”

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing. I just... I had friends in Ipswich.” 

“That's great,” she said, much more harshly than intended. “We all did. And if anyone can save them I'd wager it'd be you. Will you help?”

“I...” Running his hand through his hair was an unexpectedly human gesture of worry, and Grell realized that the incident's seriousness may have touched the deserter much more than he was letting on. “I don't know if I can. These zombies, the way they were created... They're not the same as my dolls, no, not at all. I implanted empty reels into corpses – these shinigami have their own souls intact. Not comparable at all. But, hmm... No, even so...” his voice dropped to a mutter and abruptly he turned away from her, eyes scanning the shelves along the back of the room. “I don't know if... But, no, that wouldn't help. No. No, I'll have to do some research first, however I go about anything. Give me time, give me time... Hm.” Turning back, he cocked his head again and said simply, “I'll do what I can, although it may not be much. If you could bring me a sample of the contaminated flesh – dead _or_ undead, any will do – that could help. If not” - he spread his hands wide, palms out - “I can only ask around and hope for some information to fall into my lap. Much as what you've just told me has today, heh. I'll contact you if I find anything... yes.”

“Aren't you a darling. Thank you, really – I'll bring you a body as soon as I'm able.”

She blew him a kiss on a whim, and jumped away before he had the chance to reply.

_Thank goodness._

Her hallway was as she had left it, but - a little worryingly – the sitting room was not. Will had disappeared. The sofa was covered in blood and patches of fur around where he had been, so evidently the rabbit had been consumed – thoroughly, by the looks of it – and yet he had gone. She called his name, once, twice, and upon receiving no answer at all she decided she would have to systematically search each room individually.

_Please don't have escaped; come on, Will, please don't tell me you've gotten out_. Logically, she knew that he couldn't have – all of the doors were locked, as were the windows, and she had removed the keys in the knowledge that he was smart enough to find them if he wanted to if they were still in the house – but the thought still scared her. If he were out she knew he would either kill someone or be killed himself.

She did find him, eventually, on the second round of the house. He had been easy to overlook, because she had thought to check behind the curtains and even under the beds before she came across him in the bath.

Fully clothed and curled with his arms around himself in a fetal position, William looked more pathetic than she had ever seen him before.

“...Will? What are you doing?”

One greengage eye peered out from the confines of his elbow – but she was relieved that it was quite so _green_. “...Digesting,” William muttered at length, as though mildly embarrassed, and Grell felt her face move into puzzlement.

“...In the bath?”

“Yes.” _Evidently_ , she had the feeling he wanted to say.

“You could do it somewhere more comfortable, couldn't you? What was wrong with the sofa? Hell, you could take the spare bed – or my bed, if you-”

“ _No_.” He looked about as put out by the idea as he could have expected to be if she had suggested it in health, in flirting – but he was untouchable to her now, and she knew it. Perhaps he didn't. “Sofa... blood,” he added, and then, “Sorry.”

“It's fine. It's seen worse.” The zombie's face twisted into sneering disapproval for a moment before the expression was hidden by something more guarded, and then obscured completely again by his arm. “Are you sure you're okay here?”

No answer was put forth other than a sigh, and Grell decided to leave him alone. “Just... shout if you need anything, okay? Let me know if you... Yeah.”

William's silence held, and Grell turned away.


	7. On Paper

_Feeling down; be wary of sudden change in temperament or attempts to hurt you. Apologies._

The paper had revolutionized their ability to mutually communicate; Grell found herself arriving home to one note or a dozen waiting pinned to the wall just inside the door, a collection of warnings or simple thoughts that occurred to William throughout her daily absence as being either of interest or importance. Sometimes they were very auxiliary - _Could you bring a book; Could you do me a favour and retrieve_ (any given item) _from the office; I broke the lamp in the kitchen, very sorry; Could you get me another shirt, this one is filthy; Have been feeling off for several hours, uncertain whether this means anything. Approach with caution._ \- but alongside them were the evidence of that strange thoughtfulness that came with being alone; god knew she'd had enough experience of that to recognize it. These notes were sometimes perfectly neat and sometimes barely legible, scrawled either in a great haste or with a hand that no longer wanted to obey signals from the brain.

_I can feel it in my head, it itches, it aches; Why am I alone, where did everyone go; I don't think I can actually feel pain - do you think the nerves in the brain die first?; Who am I writing these notes for?; Where am I? This is not my house; Who is Andreas Sneddon? I know the name, but I cannot put a face to it; Do you think death will be as quiet as this? Am I already dead? The word has ceased to hold meaning; Cannot remember name – remember melancholia only; A reaper is given the promise of a forgiveness but surely one so tainted as this corpse will head toward nothing more permeable than a purgatory, or hell – where do undead go?_

_What exact sequence of abominations did I do to deserve this? You must tell me; my head is full of holes._

_I have never been kind to you._

_I hope more than anything that you shall not miss me._

Sometimes he would scour lines out, or simply shred up notes before she had the opportunity to read them – she found the paper waste in flakes across the floor, a brief scattering of summer snow - and she never could quite work out whether this was simply because those particular pieces were irrelevant or spur of the moment secrets that he regretted after their formation.

She didn't ask.

Overall, the household situation seemed to have gotten better even if William's health hadn't shown any signs of improvement (and they both knew it never would). The notes allowed them to hold easy conversation – or at least easier conversation than that previous mangling of short words and sounds – and she was getting much better at recognizing when he would want to talk or be left in solitude. She moved toward eating in much more often, and sometimes he would sit opposite her at the table and avoid her eyes.

Work seemed to be ticking on amazingly monotonously; one could be forgiven for believing that nothing had happened to shake the very foundations of the dispatch in recent times. Grell signed papers and filled out forms and occasionally managed to scavenge a short reap, but often less than once a day. The supervisory role was terribly ill-suited for her, but the other designated administrator had been transferred to the Norwich office in light of the sudden drastic lack of available Collections administrators so she was stuck with it, perhaps indefinitely. This change in her position resulted in a lot less barbed comments being aimed at her face, but a hundredfold more floated around behind her back. She knew that people had heard that she was playing hospice for Will and subsequently knew exactly what sort of rumours were likely to be sliding about the office. But she got on with her work and, in the strange silence that sprung from having Grell Sutcliff shut away in her own private room instead of mixing with her colleagues, so did everyone else.

Special Affairs kept quiet, and she only went down to visit them once of her own accord, morbidly curious as to what Davies and her team of interns were doing; and as to whether any progress had been made. She had forwarded the written results of every meticulous question that she had been asked to ask Will but received no whisper in reply.

The reason for this seemed, when she went to investigate, to be purely disorder.

“I'm afraid you can't go in to actually see them at the moment,” Grell was told by the fly-away haired and dizzy expressioned young lady on desk duty. She looked as though she hadn't slept in several days, and her hands moved restlessly as she spoke. “We're all terribly busy. Some of them haven't quite settled in yet, even though it's been five days – we're still sorting out the housing arrangements – I say housing, it's not exactly high class conditions to live in – but I'm sure the boss could spare a moment or two – I'll go and get her, shall I?”

Without waiting for an answer, the woman hopped out from behind her desk – allowing Grell an unobscured view of paperwork that had been doodled over with various scenes picked out in stick figures that wouldn't be out of place in a horror drama – and disappeared through the door to the department's holding area. There was a very brief span of time between the door swinging open and the door swinging shut in which strived, for a moment, to be heard; one sharp cry of alarm, and several low broken utterances and calls of half-conscious corpses.

And then all was still.

Helen Davies burst out of the entrance several minutes later, startling Grell enough that the reaper actually took a step backward. She had expected the administrator of Special Affairs to look as she had before, white-coated and prim, possibly holding a clipboard.

In fairness, she was wearing the coat. It just wasn't white anymore.

“Ms Sutcliff! Goodness, you've come at a right moment, haven't you? Pardon my manners, I'd shake your hand or something but as you can see -” she paused to spread her hands, indicating the almost _black_ filth of her gloves from layer after layer of what had to be blood - “I'm not at my most hygienic at the moment. Did you come wanting anything specific from me?”

Grell tried to gather her thoughts and address the spattered woman in front of her. The trend of red didn't stop at her gloves; her coat was smeared in the stuff, and there were flecks of it across the visor of the protective goggles that had for some reason been donned. Davies' hair was tied up securely and hidden under a cap, similarly unclean. She looked more like a surgeon than a scientist, and bore some resemblance to another woman Grell had known who had more often than not been covered in red. That had been the blood of whores, though, not reapers.

“What have you been _doing?_ ”

“Trying to get a grip on what's going on!” Davies exclaimed, wringing her hands. “We're all in a bit of a tizzy. The zombies are really as human as the rest of us – some of them can't stand the sight of each other, some can't bear to be away from each other, some are very violent, others very meek – but they're all unpredictable. It's very difficult to communicate with them – even if their speech was perfect they all have a habit of shouting over one another, arguing – and you can never tell how close they are to lashing out. And, to top it all off, some of them won't stop hurting themselves! We're keeping all of those ones in isolation so that they don't upset the others – that's why I look like this, we're just in the middle of cleaning out one of the cages; the man in question ripped up one of his own arms – but we can't convince them to stop. Some of them won't do it if they're being watched, or do it sporadically and are fine the rest of the time, but it's really bad. Some of them have died.”

“Really? I thought they couldn't unless you got their heads?”

“So did we! That's why we gave them so much slack about the self-destruction – we doubted it would have any affect other than to make them a bit less mobile. Which, I mean, is still a terrible thing and we'd rather they didn't do it, but they clearly can't feel any physical discomfort so we just left them to it. But some of them – it's when they bust up their lungs, usually, that does it. They need to breathe; no lungs, they die. A couple of them died with no apparent injury to the lungs or brains, though – they just seemed to shut down. We don't know if there was internal damage - we dissected them, couldn't find any – or if it was something due to stress or shock.”

Grell saw an opening and took it. “How many have died?”

“Only a dozen or so so far, but I'm afraid I think that number will rise.”

“Could I ask a... very, very high favour of you?”

This encouraged a sharp look of alarmed suspicion from Davies. “What sort of favour?”

“Nothing that would compromise your work. I just... I have a friend who would be inclined to help with finding out what happened, and if it can be helped in any way at all, but he'd need matter to work from. I told him I would bring him a body.”

Davies frowned, deeply, muttering, “You shouldn't make promises like that. You shouldn't even have told this 'friend' of yours what has happened – we've been doing pretty well at keeping it from becoming common knowledge. I take it he's not a reaper?”

“No,” Grell lied. “But he's not a demon or anything like that either, don't worry. He just knows a lot about medics and bodies and a bit about undead.”

Hesitating, Davies pulled a face, but then said, “We-e-ell... Oh, to _hell_ with it. We're not making progress as fast as we should be – another set of hands working on the problem can't be a bad thing, as long as you're certain he's trustworthy. You need to impress upon him the necessity of keeping everything clean, alright? We're still not certain what platform the condition spreads through, but we know it can be spread posthumously. We...” her voice dropped in the some moment her expression did, all life leaving her for a moment. “One of the juniors caught it after being in contact with a corpse – the first one that managed to kill itself. He's not as bad as the Ipswich reapers yet – nowhere near – but it's only a matter of time. So now we've got into the habit of just incinerating _everything_ that goes near the zombies – all clothes, any implements, anything we use to clean the area and any remains of food we give them – and any fully examined corpses themselves once we've looked over them as thoroughly as possible. We've got a few sitting downstairs in quarantine, to see if they'll rot after death or not – it's too early to tell yet – but, aye. Tell him that. I can give you the next body that becomes available, after we've autopsied it; I'll package it all up so it doesn't leak everywhere or whatever – I'll inform you when it's ready to go. Unless your friend wants to come here? That'd be illegal, of course, but much, much safer for everyone.”

The fact that Davies was willing to break reaper law threw Grell more than all of the other harrowing information she had just had cascaded onto her. “No, I doubt he'd be able to leave his... workplace. Thank you. So your- the junior who got infected, how did that happen, exactly?”

“We've no idea. He was working with three others, and they all appear to be fine. In all honesty I think it was a case of ill hygiene if anything.”

“So there's... There's very little chance of me becoming infected due to living in such close proximity to Will?”

Davies pursed her lips and met her eyes. “I... That's a good question. I honestly do not know. I'd say no – most of us here are in close proximity to a lot more of them than you are every day, and as I said, it was only that one junior who suffered for it. But then again – how 'close' are you?”

It seemed unlikely that Davies meant to imply exactly what she was implying, but Grell took offence anyway. “Hey! No, we're not- You think I would-? I haven't so much as laid a finger on him. More often than not we aren't even in the same room together.”

“Sorry, sorry! I just wanted to check. No, I think you should be fine. How is he, anyway?”

It took a moment to consider the answer to that one. “He's... well, he's a zombie. But he's doing better than he was, I think; we've settled on a system using written word to communicate, which is easier than speaking. I've been giving him rabbits to eat, alive - is that okay?”

“You've got him _writing_? Is it legible? I'd never even considered that. But, yes, rabbits are fine; we've split the population here fifty-forty between rabbits and pigeons, to see if there's any differences – there doesn't appear to be – and we've got the other ten percent on a variety of other feeding methods, mostly drips. None of them will eat dead matter – one of the deaths that was actually entirely our fault was that we attempted to see how long a zombie would last until it _had_ to eat, and it didn't. The woman we tested that on starved herself to death without so much as touching anything we offered.” Davies broke off again, blinking. “It's really not nice, working with them like this. Sometimes they may as well be monsters; other times it's impossible not to recognize them as people. That could be you in that cage, you think; could be me. They're scared, of themselves and of what's happening to them, and we've been telling them that we should be able to revert the effects of the zombiism given time, that they may one day be as alive as we are – but they believe that as little as we do.”

She was interrupted by the door banging open again to let the secretary back out, who glanced from Grell to Davies and back again before speaking. “Boss, we've calmed the isolated group right down – some of them are crying again but they're not being aggressive anymore – but those three older ladies who're housed together are getting agitated, like, violent agitated – could you-”

“Yes, I'll be right there.” She gave an exhausted sigh, turned apologetic eyes to Grell and excused herself. “Well, I'm needed elsewhere; sorry to cut this meeting short. If you've anything you need to ask, please do send a message over – don't just turn up like this, let me speak to you when it's more quiet – and I'll notify you if we get anything that you need to know. And that... sample for your friend. God, I hope it's not another fight like the last one...”

And then Davies and her secretary vanished, and Grell stood for a moment before returning to her own irrelevant work.

* *

The house felt cold when she was away.

This was strange, because William knew that whatever it was that regulated the temperature of living things had died in him alongside everything else. It was not that he could no longer feel the cold; merely that he was consistently cold, all the time. It was just more noticeable when Grell wasn't there.

There was nothing poetic or romantic about this, he felt; logically there could be several reasons for its occurrence. Her own body heat, perhaps, and movement in the room could warm the air – even if only marginally – and touch his cold skin. Or possibly it was an entirely mental thing; her presence was a distraction, allowing him not to focus on the constant background physical discomfort of not-quite-living like this.

When she was here, he tended to be far too preoccupied by her presence alone to bother wasting any precious thought on the temperature. He found himself fixed on Grell for reasons he abhorred – and she would too, if she were to know of them; he wanted to touch her, to _feel_ the living warmth in her skin, which would have been fine if ironically tragic in its timing except that he knew - whether it was explicit in his mind or not – that that was the hunger talking, wheedling away subtly from back in the shadows where it thought he wouldn't notice it. He was aware that he wanted her to come within reach of his hands less to show her any semblance of affection and more likely to ensnare her in his grasp and kill her.

It was an unpleasant feeling to not know how many of his thoughts belonged to him and how many belonged to his _infection_ , but he supposed it couldn't be helped. He managed to keep his eyes away from her, for the most part – it helped to not have to look at that white white skin, so pale one could be forgiven for assuming it to be bloodless, except he knew it wasn't bloodless, because he could hear her heart.

William could not remember if he had ever seen Grell bleed. He must have, he supposed. He had known her for a long time.

How long?

They had sat their final exam together; he knew that. Had they met beforehand? For how long had they been partners before he had been promoted? Did it matter? He could ask her – and decided to do so, moving to find the pen and paper where he had left them on the table from whenever last he'd written a note. Scribbling the query took more effort than he'd be willing to admit, his hand to eye coordination apparently at a low point – never a good sign – but standing was easier today than it had been yesterday, and he shambled out to the hall to pin this note up beside its fellows of the day.

There was one scrap of paper there that was new to him – Grell must have written it before leaving for work, loathe to disturb him – and he considered it in silence for some time.

_It's like living with a ghost_ , said the red scrawl, and William wondered what on earth she wanted him to make of it.

Sometimes it didn't seem fair to burden her with his presence; he knew that she was suffering for it. It was in the aching sadness in her face when she smiled and the uncertainty in her steps as she walked through her own house never quite sure where he was, or how he was, or if he would turn on her at the drop of a hat. It must be stressful – especially given that her only real escape was the _office_ , which had never been her favourite place as far as he was aware. This flat was her home, her sanctuary of a sort, and he was very much an intruder, however much she had wanted to bring him here.

He wanted to tell her that he was sorry, sorry for all this hassle and pain, sorry that she had to put up with him now in such a state, a cruel mimicry of what she had always claimed to want of him; attention, closeness beyond the confines of their work. He wanted to express at least some vestige of gratitude for allowing him to exist alongside her when any sane-minded reaper would have had him put down or left him secure in that sterile room full of light and gas. However, his mouth would not form the sounds, and the more he attempted to arrange the words on paper the more jumbled they became, until eventually he decided that a note would never do. A letter would have to be written, William decided, at length and when he was feeling better.

He wanted to express to her every fleeting thought that was left in his head, because he could feel them siphoning away every time he tried to grasp hold of one and because he couldn't remember if he had ever had anyone else to _tell_. He wanted her to outlive him for a hundred years, a thousand, as many as she could, to watch over the world as it evolved through timeless green eyes because he would not.

He wanted to quell the incessant pounding of her heart; feel the organ pulsating in his palms, sticky and firm, those swollen walls of muscle torn loose from their cage within her chest.


	8. In Flesh

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for a dissection

“What is my name?”

“G _rell._ Gre... ll Sutcliff.”

“That's right, darling. What's your name?”

“Will. Spears. Will _i_ am, T, Spears.”

They were the first questions she tended to ask now, upon arriving home, because their answers told her more about him that his actions ever could. Sometimes it was just a hesitant “ _...W_ ill _.”_ and sometimes it was an almost fully formed _“William T Spears”_ , but the fact that he remembered consistently that much was a heavy reassurance. He had never failed to name her, either, which seemed good.

The recent few days had passed in what was apparently a flurry of progression; Davies had managed to hand over a spent corpse sooner than expected due to a 'clerical error' (Grell did not look at the body, knowing that clerical errors could have disastrous enough effects on paperwork to satisfy her curiosity as to what they could do to people) and the Undertaker had managed to get back to her within only a further three. She was heading back to him now, having actually managed to complete the days stack of administrative tasks earlier than expected, and couldn't read herself well enough to know if the balloon in her chest was born of anticipation or trepidation.

She bounced through the door without any particular thought to as to whether he would be busy or not – the letter inviting her down had come in a good few hours ago, but she had been uncharacteristically busy with her work (heaven forbid leaving files unattended – Grell was beginning to understand why Will had always seemed so detached) and not actually read it properly until the majority of her papers were cleared.

“Undertaker?” _Come out come out wherever you are_ , she found herself tempted to add, in oddly high spirit. Perhaps the old man would have news – perhaps he had discovered something that could help.

“Here – through here. Round the back, heh.”

Slightly surprised that he wasn't hiding in a coffin, Grell raised her eyebrows and followed the direction, finding that 'round the back' lead through a small arched doorway and into what was presumably the room in which Undertaker fixed up the corpses that were absolutely not fit for the public eye. It was dark in spite of the three lamps that burned on the side, and its low roof gave it an oddly cramped feel.

“Cosy, isn't it?” asked the Undertaker, standing over the corpse spread across the table. “Please, take a seat, dearie. Or come and take a look if you feel up to it.”

It wasn't difficult to step forward to stand beside him at the table. It was difficult to bring herself to look down upon the corpse, in spite of everything.

The half of his head that was still intact showed that he had had curly bog-brown hair and a weak chin, and it could just about be seen that he had been short of stature and slim with it.

Grell was trying very hard not to look at the clean bleached pink of the exposed and partially dissected brain, or the way that the edges of skin were pinned back so neatly to display the greying organs. It was not as though she were squeamish, or had never attended an anatomy class, or had never seen a dead reaper – but there was something that made her skin crawl about seeing something undeniably close to herself taken apart for examination, sterilized and washed so clean of blood and any sort of life. “What did you find?”

The question made the Undertaker grin wide, leering out at her, and he giggled before answering. “Many things; many things. I'm sure your surgeons up on high are aware of most of them, but it can do no harm to share nonetheless.”

One gaunt finger stretched to point out the exposed bodily organs, moving along to point them out one by one. “There was a large laceration across the abdomen already when I started work – look, you can see the way the skin's not cut properly here – which had ruptured several of the digestive organs. It was interesting to note, look, there, that in spite of that this fellow was eating anyway; you've got several different remains of birds sitting in the stomach. The organs weren't functioning at all; the food rots of its own accord and just... leaks. The lungs, on the other hand, were in perfect working order – which doesn't make sense, ha! Because the only reason for air is to put oxygen in the blood, but his heart's as much dead flesh as the rest of them, so it wasn't flowing very much at all. Anatomically, these things shouldn't exist at all.”

He broke off with another heavy chuckle, as though delighted that such a monstrosity had come to light, and gestured up toward the open cranium. “None of that's what killed our boy here, though. It was all in his head, heh, in a manner of speaking - _look_.” The finger moved in toward the sliced brain and dug his fingernail into the mass, lifting it slightly before the fatty flesh split. “You see? It's _rotted_ , not quite through and through, at a much increased rate than the rest of the body. The damage is not particularly bad in some of the outer areas, but the cerebellum... That bit there... is almost completely gone, see? And the medulla's not in much better shape. Practically all control he had over himself was lost; and thus, he died.”

Grell stared, opened her mouth, closed her mouth. “How?”

The Undertaker's face lit up again, and he tapped his soiled black talon against his nose. “Methinks you've got yourself something more like a virus in these corpses than a curse, my dear. The brain was _targeted_ \- although whether through reason biological or offensive I cannot discern. I don't suppose you know of a motive for the original incident?”

“None more than can be theorized – we don't even know if it was an attack against reapers, or specifically Ipswich, or even if it was just a simple huge cock-up on behalf of someone running experiments in their office. I don't think we've found any evidence of anything illegal having been in progress – obviously as the office was razed we cannot use anything physical, but Upper Management are pleading seven shades of innocent as to having any knowledge of illegalities there.”

“And the affected reapers themselves? I assume they aren't all in quite such a shape as this fellow?”

“They find it very difficult to talk. I've not actually been allowed in to see them; I don't know exactly how they're doing.”

“Hm,” the Undertaker said, and for a moment the smile vanished. “I wonder why..? So they are not all progressing at the same rate? Some are worse off than others?”

“I don't know. I assume they are, though, if some have rotted enough to die and others are still near enough themselves.”

“Hm,” he repeated. “I think... Could you get me another one, then, in a week or two? Allow me to compare them, see if the damage relates to the time or the extent of their injuries or any other given factor. I can draw no conclusive results with just one.”

Grell considered how Davies' face might look upon being requested to pass another corpse under the counter, and replied, “I'll do my best.”

“You say that as though you're doing a favour for me, rather than the other way around,” he laughed, and tilted his head a little to allow him a better look at her. “Although you know, there would be more effective ways to aid me in my work... A live subject, for instance, or at least a _lively_ subject...”

“No.” She didn't even have to think about that one. “They'd never let you cut up someone who's still breathing.”

“Oh, I know that, yes!” He was giggling again, the noise horribly grating. “You misunderstand me on two points, Grell Sutcliff. I would not necessarily have to 'cut them up', not completely, not enough to kill them, no; and I would not necessarily have to ask your medical staff for permission, either. You seem to be on the same side as me, Grell; you are also in possession of a corpse, are you not?”

Grell drew in a sharp breath as his suggestion became clear, and hissed, “I am in possession of my closest and oldest _friend_ , and if you think I would let you _vivisect_ him for any reason under the sun-”

“Please, don't kid yourself, Grell Sutcliff.” The Undertaker's tone was suddenly dark and he was suddenly much closer to her, in spite of not having obviously made the effort to move. “If what happened to this man is happening to your 'friend' – ha, I'll bet he never called you the same! - do you really believe he has any chance of recovering? He's dead. Twice dead. It would be doing him a service to end his suffering; and doing so in a way that could protect others now or in the future would be-”

“I'll bring you your body,” she snapped, and jumped away.

Her hallway was bright and welcoming, a very slight warm scent on the air giving it an odd homely feel which she had never quite attributed to her own flat before, and she took a moment to simply collect herself. _What a mad old bastard._ He was not going to get his clatty hands anywhere near Will, now or ever.

The note-wall had three new things to say, one after the other; _You're out of milk_ , _I'm sorry_ , and _It was a stupid thing to do, I shall not attempt it again_.

Grell frowned.

She found Will in his usual location – on the couch – head turned at an angle to stare into the blank wall beside him. How long had he just been sitting there for? She cleared her throat when it became clear he hadn't heard her heels, causing him to startle a little and turn to look at her. Upon seeing her, he relaxed again.

“Late,” he said, mildly.

“Sorry. Got caught up trying to help people who don't deserve my aid again; but on the plus side, I _did_ get all of the day's paperwork done. Are you proud of me?”

A tiny, wry smile touched the corner of his mouth, and William rolled his eyes at her before scribbling something down onto the notepad and then throwing it to her.

_Never thought I'd see the day. You'll be telling me Knox has stopped womanising next._

Grell laughed and tossed it back to him, shaking her head. “You can't have everything, I'm afraid. Ronnie'll keep that up as long as he can move his hips, I'm sure.”

Will dipped his head in agreement, and said, “Ha,” very softly.

All instinct bade her go to his side to offer comfort, put an arm around his shoulder or her lips to his skull, but common sense overrode it and she could only try to convey her sympathy at the dejected unhappiness in her beloved's greyish eyes.

“What's all that about me being out of milk, anyway? What did you do?”

A look of immediate alarm crossed the zombie's face, and he looked pointedly away from her. “Nothing,” he said, far too articulately for it to be anything other than a lie.

“Come on, Will. What did you do?”

“ _No_ thing. I...” He broke off, frowned a little guiltily, and then wrote at some length again and jerked it in her direction again. It was a misjudged throw, and hit her foot instead of her arms.

_It seemed like a good idea at the time – it wasn't – don't concern yourself over it. I did nothing wrong. I just made a slight error in an assumption about myself. Everything was cleaned up._

“Yes, but – what on earth could you have used the whole jug of milk for? What were you _doing_ , washing yourself in it?”

William flushed, and the notepad made another two way trip.

_I deemed it unhygienic to touch a food item that you would then consume – what if this condition is contagious? And even if it isn't, it's still unpleasant – and disposed of what I didn't use._

He met her eye again, his lips thinning slightly in what was perhaps an unconscious display of discomfort or embarrassment. “That still doesn't actually tell me anything about why you felt you needed the milk in the first place, though.”

_You also own one less teabag than you did this morning._

Grell stared at him, and hoped he didn't see the pity that corroded her.

“Oh, _Will_ -”

* *

He had tried to make tea.

He wasn't quite sure what had driven him to it, exactly; he hadn't been thirsty, and the memory of the smell of the drink was strangely repellent, but the notion had seized him that morning and refused to leak away. He had wanted... to taste, perhaps, something that wasn't rabbit's blood, to feel the warmth of that once-familiar liquid in his mouth in lieu of the warmth of his own body, which would never be warm again. He wanted to pretend that he was capable of any lost aspect of normality, even if only for a moment.

It had taken some time to rummage through Grell's cupboard and find the tea; he had expected tea leaves, somewhere, as bags weren't due in London for a few years yet and thus were difficult to acquire. Her entire kitchen was a horribly disorganized mess, and she seemed to own several sets of dull red containers in which she kept her various different items of food, some of which looked as though they hadn't been touched in some length of time. Food didn't go off in the reaper realm anywhere near as quickly as it did in the human, but nonetheless he could swear that some of the boxes were tinged with blue-grey.

The milk was easier – it sat in the door of the fridge, mostly full. Grell didn't appear to own a teapot, much to William's bemusement, so he decided that it would be fine to simply infuse it in a mug. It would make the tea horribly strong, of course, but even at that point he had known that the taste would almost certainly mean nothing.

 _Boil the water. Let the tea infuse, let it cool._ Familiarity washed over him, and the tea smelled like home.

His motor control abandoned him when he attempted to add the milk, allowing a very small amount into the cup, a larger amount down the side and most of its volume over the counter. William sighed, placed the now mostly empty jug down, and after a thought washed it out entirely in boiling water. 

He also cleaned the counter, being painstakingly careful to ensure that there was no excess left – it wouldn't do for Grell to return home and find that he had made such a mess of her kitchen – and then picked up the mug, carrying it carefully through to sit down.

He was procrastinating by this point, he knew. There was no desire in him to go anywhere near the tea, and he must have been at least partially aware of what was going to happen. Still, he stared down into the liquid, watching the steam rising from it in vaporous curls, and then raised it to his lips.

Three was no immediate reaction. If the tea were scalding, he did not know; the temperature was oddly indeterminable against his tongue. It tasted bad, off, but there was every possibility that that was the fact that it was a teabag – and who knew how old a teabag, too – rather than any failing on behalf of his body.

He wished he could believe that.

Forcing himself to swallow turned out to be more difficult than he had anticipated, and when he had done so, he found himself gagging. The tea seemed thick and sluggish in his throat, out of place and unwanted, and in sudden mounting dismay he stood and moved back through to the kitchen as quickly as possible, whereupon he retched and threw up in the sink.

It was just the liquid he had consumed moments ago, at first, but after a moment he found himself pushing up bile and the taste of _that_ really did alert him to the fact that his taste buds had failed spectacularly. It was not pleasant at all, but merely faint as though tasted from far away, if that were possible.

It was impossible to tell whether he remained at the sink for a second or a century, but eventually his body gave up on trying to rid itself of everything he had ever eaten and he was allowed to just stand and breathe, haggard.

 _You're losing your mind, Spears,_ he'd thought, and then remembered how close to the truth that was.

Against his better judgement and possibly out of perversity, William had used the remainder of the tea to rinse his mouth out, and then spent an extensive amount of time cleaning the soiled sink. 

And now Grell stood before him, alive with eyes wide, and he watched again as her heart broke for him. _Stop that, you foolish thing. I should mean nothing to you._

She took a seat, far across the room from him, distress colouring her distant expression as she stared at him. “Well, I can forgive you that, darling,” he heard her say, quiet enough that it may have been aimed at nobody but herself, and then she closed her eyes tight for a moment as though in pain.

“Sorry,” he managed, and the word hung between them, cruel.

Grell's expression closed, and when she looked at him again she managed to stay carefully emotionless, and he was relieved.

“What is my name?”

“Grell. Grell... Sut... Sutcliff.”

“Good. What's your name?”

The zombie opened its mouth, and then stopped as the word vanished from the forefront of its mind.

Name?

He could feel the memory of it on his tongue, flat and monochrome, and tried to say it, except that there was no substance to what he was trying to say. “N...ame,” he tried, and felt Grell's heart lurched from within its security inside her chest. “Name, name, name, name-”

He was panicking, because he had had a name and it was gone, beyond his numb reach, and he couldn't remember who he was and he knew Grell, she was there, beating, beating, had he beaten her in the past? He couldn't remember who he had been or who she had been to him or whether they had been close or aeons distant but he could remember her name, beating, beating, irrelevant to his own -

A pen glanced against his temple, the knock sharp if not painful, and the zombie stared up at the reaper who had thrown it, jolted into silence of mind and mouth.

“ _Will_ ,” she hissed, although he couldn't tell if it were a command or a noun or a person or his name until she clarified it. “Your name is Will. You are William, remember? William T Spears.”

He couldn't. The name was as unfamiliar to him as the house he was in, as unfamiliar as the deep-seated worry on Grell's face, as unfamiliar as his own mind. It was not a name he had heard before. It wasn't his.

There was a notepad beside him – he scrabbled for it, scrawled thought to word and skimmed it across the floor at her.

_I CANT REMEMBER_

Grell's brows knitted together, pained, and when she looked up again she seemed as lost as he felt. “You're William,” she said again, softly. “You're a reaper – you died in seventeen ninety-something, I think, you told me once; you graduated at the same time as I did, December, sixteenth -”

 _William_ sat still, and let the cold wash of her lies baptise him anew.


	9. Progress

The call to return down to Special Affairs came much sooner than Grell expected; within a week the notification inviting her back to that department was on her desk, and within a minute of reading it she was down in the white entrance with the secretary's desk.

Everything seemed much more in order than her last visit. The secretary greeted her with an easy smile and shuffled her papers into order before heading into the room to find her boss, and returned mere moments later with Davies in tow.

“Ms Sutcliff! That was quick.”

Grell shrugged. “I wasn't caught up in anything important. Is it good or bad news from you, tell me?”

“Good news!” exclaimed Davies, with more life than Grell had seen from her before. “Or at least good progress. Fantastic progress! We've made a breakthrough.”

Her excitement was contagious. “You've cured one of them!?”

And then, as quickly as it had appeared, it froze and then dropped. “Well... No. Not exactly. Well, technically. We think we did.”

“...How can you not know?”

“Why don't we take a walk?” Davies countered, backtracking, and then added, “I'll explain things to you as we go.”

The door was held open – there was no extruding noise this time, nothing to give any hint as to what lay beyond – and Grell followed Davies through into what turned out to be more of a hall than a room.

The zombies were obvious; they sat in cells against the walls, barred in, their living areas small but at least in some state of apparent hygiene. The walls and floors were white in all inhabited areas, and a team of three juniors were busy scrubbing out a cell that had clearly been vacated for a violent reason. The amount of protective gear they were wearing set off every warning bell in Grell's mind.

One, the first cage Grell looked into, contained a youngish reaper – no, zombie – who had almost no hair and no eyes, and a myriad of other injuries that disfigured its body. He was muttering, and Grell strained to hear what he was saying without getting closer to the cell.

“Clarence. Clah-rence, Clarence?” The man rocked back and forth slightly as he called the name, his single arm stretched blindly through the bars.

“Who is he?”

Davies shook her head. “We've no idea. There was nobody registered under the name of Clarence as working at Ipswich, so we've no idea if he was someone from his past, or anther division, or anything. We don't know who most of the zombies are – we've got the list of everyone who was supposed to be there that day, but the body count didn't match and most of them are unrecognisable anyway. The Collections administrators who went across remembered their own names enough to tell us who they were – and when they didn't, they identified each other without too much hassle – but the Ipswich zombies had no idea at all. It's a mess.”

They moved on.

The clicking of her own shoes was the loudest sound in the room - it seemed almost to echo, and some of the dead reapers raised their heads to watch her pass. Their expressions varied immensely; fragile hope in some passing to blank lack of feeling in others, and to Grell's disquiet a few of them hauled themselves to their feet as though to get closer to her, or raised dirty, desperate hands like beggars, eyes full of despair. Davies spared them a sympathetic glance, but then warned Grell back.

“We've lost two juniors to them doing that. They wait until you get right up close and then lunge at you. It's horrible to see.”

“...Why were the juniors stupid enough to approach in the first place?”

Davies bit her lip, and glanced at the inmates before meeting Grell's eyes. “They're still people. We implemented a paper communication system, like you suggested, but some of them still prefer to talk – I don't think they meant to do it. One, her voice was very hoarse, she became friendly with the first junior, they talked a lot, and then her voice gave out on her, so naturally he went closer... It was halfway a beheading before we managed to intervene. He bled out; there was nothing we could do.”

Grell raised her eyebrows, uncertain whether she was deeply shocked or entirely unsurprised. “What happened to the zombie?”

“She's still there – that one. She hasn't said a word since the incident.”

Davies pointed to a cell on their left, and Grell followed her gaze.

It would have been impossible to judge the creature as female. Her matted hair was shoulder length and black through dirt rather than pigment, and her skin fared not much better. A rent had been ripped across half of her face, clearly caused by fingernails, and her arms ended in stringy stumps instead of hands.

Two copper smears stood like talismans on the wall behind her, and below them the ground was slick with shards of bone and flesh.

“Did she..?”

“Yes. I told you – they can be very self-destructive when they feel like it.”

Full of misgiving, Grell voiced another thought that tugged at the back of her mind, even though she was fairly certain that the answer was self evident. “There seems a lot fewer of them than there were when we brought them here?”

“Oh, yes. As I've said, some took their own lives; a few of the ones we thought were alive weren't, and several more have died since then. We had to separate them after some of them killed each other – that's why they're all in isolated containment now.”

“W _hat_?”

She could understand exactly why they would kill living reapers. She could understand why they would take it upon themselves to destroy their own bodies. But each other?

Davies shrugged again, uncomfortably. “Sometimes they got into fights. They can communicate amongst each other much better than they can communicate with us – we think remarks may have been passed, or old feuds stirred up, or something. But others – others – well. Some of the ones who seemed – close – they just sort of... They took each other apart. Like machines. They showed no resistance, no feeling toward the action at all – they just let themselves be dismantled bit by bit until they died.”

“...Oh.” There seemed little else to say. “And you let them?”

“They got rather violent when we tried to dissuade them.”

“I... see. And they were- they'd been fed, there was no reason..?”

“Some of them killed each other, others didn't. We found no correlation between any factors; they were all well fed, none had any obvious inclinations toward hurting each other – we isolated those ones from the start – and it happened within a day. They all just turned on each other, but not in an animalistic way – we've no idea what motivated them to do it. It was assisted suicide, if anything.”

Grell looked away from the woman and watched the zombies. None seemed to be in good shape; missing limbs, those awful open wounds, burst eyes and broken jaws. And they were quiet and still, and she was reminded of her own lodger, head in his hands on the couch. If he were here, would he have suffered the same loss of self? He was cared for in a way that these ones would not experience, and the effect of that difference appeared to be devastation on this side of the equation. 

They approached another empty cell, bloodless but covered in ink that had not been removed. This seemed to suggest it was fresh.

_I AM JOHN TARN I AM JOHN TARN I AM JOHN TARN_ screamed the writing on the wall, covering the entire expanse. “Maybe you can guess who we had housed here,” Davies said, dead-pan.

“What happened to him?”

“He's the one I actually called you here to talk about.” She stopped walking abruptly, and Grell felt her interest pique.

“So he's... alive? Give or take?”

“He's dead, actually,” replied Davies, mouth twisting into something ugly. “Which is unfortunate, because he was our best subject. He was one of the Collections lot, and he clung to his sanity with everything he had. Great bloke. Asked us repeatedly to check up on his dispatch for him, see how they were doing. When we announced that we needed a volunteer to test a theory that could help them, he was the first to put himself forward.”

“And it went wrong?”

“It went right. We operated on him, and we restarted his heart. And, as expected, he died - because he'd lost the majority of his bodily organs in Ipswich, and in spite of not raising a hand to hurt himself or anyone else whilst here we couldn't reconstruct his body. He bled himself to death, but he was alive as he did so.”

“So you cured him,” Grell asked, eyes wide. “You reverted him to a reaper?”

Davies was quiet for a moment before answering. “Well... We think so. But there was so many variables – we don't know if it would have stayed beating forever or just give out again, or if he'd retain the aggression from the zombiehood, or if he would rot despite being alive.”

“Why are you telling me this, then? If you've no definite news, why did you call me down here?” The sudden lack of solid information irked Grell much more than it should have, and she found herself snapping.

“I thought you'd want to know,” Davies replied in a soothing tone, holding up her hands in a defensive gesture. “We operated on three others – three whose wounds are survivable – and they're doing well, so far. I just thought that, given your situation with Spears, I thought you'd want to know that we're making progress. Give us a week, two; he could be cured, unless he's hurt himself further?”

“He hasn't,” Grell breathed, feeling herself soar. “He's fine. And he'll stay fine. I'll tell him about this – thank you!”

In rash and unbridled joy she caught Davies in a hug, half lifting the woman off her feet, unused as she was to embracing people smaller than herself. Davies laughed, swatted her in the chest in a light attempt to get her to let go, and when released she matched Grell's smile. “You look after him, and we'll bring him back to business,” she said, and if anything her smile grew wider. “We'll help all that can be helped, and soothe the rest. We've got this.”

“ _Thank_ you,” Grell repeated, and didn't look at the caged, mewling corpses lining the walls as she left.


	10. And Back

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To heck with my schedule; apologies. I'm away on the weekend so will post this now and the next on Friday.
> 
> ALSO this is the chapter responsible for the "Self-mutilation" tag, and imo by far the nastiest.

_“You're beginning to smell, my dear,”_ she'd said, ever so quietly, before leaving today. _“When was the last time you showered, Will?”_

He used to shower every day before work, if his memory was serving him correctly. It had been easy, quick and clean, but the concept of not smelling rotten – in the most literal sense of the word – had been lost to him on the same day as everything else. His body was decaying, and he somehow doubted that standing under pressurized water for any length of time would circumvent that.

Still, he could try, if it was bothering her. He was living here under her grace, after all, and it would perhaps feel like normality. Even if just a little. 

Grell's shower turned out to be a rather temperamental thing, the water flicking between drenching and dripping every few minutes, but it was better than nothing. God, he remembered having to live in one of these horrible little apartments. And now he supposed that he would die in one.

William stood under the lukewarm water for some time before remembering that clothes were not supposed to be worn whilst washing oneself, and chose to react to this primarily with a singe long, despairing sigh.

_No, come on, take them off or this whole exercise has been pointless._ At least Special Affairs had deemed it more prudent to give them clothes that were not complex, he reflected as he fumbled with the buttons of the shirt; although it seemed likely that those of his kind that had been left with them would not have much opportunity to take them off.

_His kind._ Not reapers, not any more - and that thought still made him experience disorientation. _Undead._

The dozens of pointillistic jets of water sputtered and hammered against his skin, and he found that he could not discern whether it was the water or his body that was so cold.

A while later he remembered that standing placidly in the shower was not any decent way to remove grime of any sort, so he raised his hands very laboriously and rubbed at his shoulders. A wide variety of soaps and shampoos clustered on the shelf beside the bath, but he made the conscious decision to touch none of them; knowing Grell they would almost certainly have been used for some sort of sordid rituals at one point or another. 

_You are literally a decaying corpse_ , his mind pointed out. _There is nothing she could have done with these soaps that could possibly be less hygienic than your own flesh._

That was true, and another great reason not to use them. It would not do to befoul her personal items with the filth of an undead.

So he washed himself, slowly and almost unconsciously, dragging his hands across the bare skin of his torso without incident until they quite unexpectedly sank down into the slimy mess of the open wound across his chest.

_Oh._ That's right. He had forgotten.

The zombie stayed very, very still, unsure of himself, and then spread his fingers wide – able in spite of the numbness that had never gone away to feel the wetness of his innards, and their elasticated shapes – before pushing gently outward, and watched the skin of his stomach split in a creeping line.

It didn't hurt. It didn't hurt at _all_ , which was oddly terrifying. It _should_ hurt. It should be excruciating, and the part of his mind that recognised that was screaming for him to stop and _look_ at what he had done to himself, this self-mutilation, but it was far away. Physically he felt nothing.

He _wanted_ to feel. It was _wrong_ not to hurt, it was wrong that he could stand here and look down upon non-surgical hands resting between his organs whist the laceration wept copper fluid and feel no pain, no horror, nothing but the sheer, overwhelming desire to feel _something_.

So he moved one hand, away from the burst skin, burrowing it back between the taunt wetness of what would soon be an ex-digestive system, then clenched his fist and _squeezed._

There was a moment of dizzying disillusionment before he felt an organ pop beneath the pressure, causing the fluid output to double, gushing from his body – his _corpse_ \- in quick trails of gory ochre and something clear and sticky, which, if he had been in the mood to speculate, he would probably have guessed to be gut fluid. 

He was slightly too preoccupied to speculate. The creature who had once known itself so well as to have a personality – it had had a _name_ once, hadn't it? - could only feel the hollowness encroaching on its core, the sheer incomprehensible emptiness that had been forced upon it and held it tight, trapped in an oozing web of half-death and slow decay, and it knew only that the sickness that accosted its every waking moment was located within its rotting shell and it had to be taken _out._

The zombie tore one hand free of itself, trailing ribbons of grey mucus and dead flesh, and there was a moment before it recognized that the desperate panting that had filled the air was its own noise. _Get it_ out _, get it out, get this_ thing _out of me-_

And then it was clawing at itself, frantically attempting to rip away the bits inside its body that had stolen its name and its identity and its life.

* * *

“Will!”

Grell was breathless, both from having jumped straight from the office to her home – a feat which she always preferred not to take in one go – and from the news itself. _He could live!_ Given a few more days, given a few more tests the departments working on the cure would get it, and Will could _live_ again.

Perhaps he would never quite heal the injuries that had killed him this time round, and perhaps he would never be as articulate as he had been before the incident in Ipswich, but his heart would beat and his body would heal and he would be himself again; a reaper. A person.

She called for him again, knowing by now that he would not necessarily be where expected in the apartment, and received no answer. There were no new notes on the wall, and no sounds at all to suggest that anything else inhabited her home. He was probably moping in the spare room again.

Systematic house searching had become somewhat a normal thing to do when she returned from work these days, and she had become much better at doing it efficiently. And once again she found herself outside the bathroom, which, today, had notes on the door.

_DO NOT ENTER, GRELL_ , said the first, rather sniffily.

_Having a shower_ , excused the second.

_So do not come in. Don't you dare._ , finished the third, complete with full stops. She tried the door anyway, to test him, and found it locked. _Well, at least I know he meant it._

She could hear the water running – or jogging, perhaps, stopping occasionally for breathers, because the showers in council flats were a joke – but nothing else, so she called through the door, just to be sure. “Will?”

Again, no answer. Not even a movement to suggest he was listening.

“Will, I've got news!”

Rapping her knuckles against the door provoked no reaction, nor did questions, nor did threats. After a while her worry became more pressing than any dignity Will had left, and – after shouting through to let him know exactly what she was doing, to give him one last chance to speak up – she slammed her shoulder into the door and knocked it off its hinges.

_Cheap council piece of crap._

She did not look at the bath. She did not look at the bath because she knew he didn't trust her enough as it was, and that he didn't want her to see him naked, so she fixed her eyes on the pile of neatly discarded clothing on the floor in front of her. It was soaked through, seeping wetness onto the bathroom floor.

“ _Will_.”

Silence, with exception of the irregular hissing of the water. It was only then that she actually paid attention to her peripheral vision, which had been telling her since the door had been removed that there was nobody standing in the shower and that the bathtub was _red_.

So Grell looked, and then stopped looking, and then threw up in the sink.

Perhaps she shouldn't have been so affected. Grell had mutilated women herself, after all, spreading their corpses out to paint entire rooms with gore, and more recently had seen the bodily destruction wrought at Ipswich, and it wasn't as though reaps were ever clean of blood. But rarely were the wounds self inflicted, or of quite this magnitude, and never had they been Will.

The man – no, not a man any more; this creature – this _corpse_ – sat laxly in a pool of his own organs, head tipped back and limbs spread very loosely apart. His nudity was rather overshadowed by the fact that he had disembowelled himself quite savagely, leaving a gaping hollow in place of everything that had resided in the space between the base of his ribcage and just below his navel, the flesh and entrails torn up around him, staining the white of the bath that awful red-brown of off meat. The organs themselves were globular and broken, their leaking fluids being slowly swept away by the water that was still spattering down over the body, washing clear stains into the crusted blood on his skin and fogging the glasses that he still wore. The length of his intestine - ragged at the end - hung out from the region of desecration, gleaming in the water.

Grell fought down the reflex that told her to retch again, and realized that he was watching her.

His eyes were half-lidded, disinterested, but burned bright emerald with the uncanny light that in a healthy reaper would suggest a high fever. They were the brightest that she had seen them since he had changed, and full of running water, sliding as it was across his face and pooling in his shallow sockets. He made no effort to dissuade this, only blinking periodically in time with his slow, shaky breaths.

“...Why did you do this to yourself?”

She was surprised that the words had managed to be delivered so calmly, cast as they were from a mouth that only wanted to shriek at the devastation her unrequited lover had wrought upon himself. He had been going to recover – he had been supposed to live.

A noise escaped him, very short and very quiet, and it took her a second to place it as a whimper as his eyes widened and she realized that not all of the water on his face had come from the shower. And then, horribly slowly, he rasped, “Mist _ake_.”

Grell felt her mouth curl downward in an involuntarily hard expression of her own distress, and stepped toward him. He made no move to stop her; just lay motionless, liquid seeping from his eyes and his stomach (the area, not the organ; it was half a foot away from him and didn't matter much now) and bright gaze locked onto her, blank as a chalkboard and about as opaque.

Offering him her hand was a stupid, reckless thing to do, but she couldn't think of anything else. He was too still; too close a reflection of death. She needed to touch him, to be sure that he was still real.

He took her wrist with cold, wet fingers, and made an effort to pull himself up with her help. 

Later she would have no memory of seeing this movement cause what was left of his innards to slither out of him and spatter down amongst their fellows, or of hearing the squidges and flat pops of his feet sinking into the excess in the floor of the bath. She wouldn't remember how he stumbled and fell against her, leaning heavily as his legs did their best to give out on him, or how as she held him up his wetness seeped into her own clothes and smeared gore across her front (but she would discern that later, when she came to burning those clothes). She wouldn't remember how short his breaths became, or how much he wept silently into her shoulder.

She did remember putting a towel over his head in the interests of safety and leading him through to her room to wrap bandages around the abomination of a wound, flinching at the hollow they presented in his figure but doing well at not thinking about it otherwise. _It's just an injury. How many times have I come home after a bad night and had to patch myself up? It's just an injury._ Will made no noise as she cleaned what was left of his skin – the congealed blood was everywhere, smeared across his torso and drenching his legs – and the same was true as she dressed him, favouring fresh clothes rather than the damp pile that had been left in the bathroom. She didn't want to go back to the bathroom.

Grell pulled the towel from his head and was met by eyes that were now a foggy gas green, pale and insipid, and Will watched her blankly until she looked away, and which point he tried to speak.

“Greh... Greh-ull... S _orry_.”

Something within her broke. “Don't you dare apologize to me. You're the one who'll suffer for this. Look at what you've done to yourself!”

“It'sss...” He frowned, and gave her an imploring look which she correctly interpreted as a request for paper. Upon being given it he scrawled _It's not as though this is the first time I've killed myself_ and Grell wondered if there was any way at all to shake the morbid fatalism from his expression.

She put a hand out with the intention of touching his arm and he turned and attempted to bite it, striking out like a snake with speed that was only matched by a reaper's own reflexes. Grell pulled away, stood, and then jumped before he could attempt anything else.

Porting blind and distressed was always a bad idea, so it came as no surprise to her when she stumbled a little upon landing and found herself somewhere dark, quiet and alone. An alley, somewhere, mortal-side. It could be anywhere.

It didn't matter.

Grell threw her full weight into a punch that shattered her fingers against the bricks of the nearest wall, choosing to slam her fist into it again and again as though breaking her hand would subdue the feelings that had come roaring back as soon as she had removed herself from Will's presence. There went her thumb, and then her wrist, and for a moment she saw white as the pain flared up her arm and forced her to give up.

_He is going to die. He is already dead._

A minute “ _Ah_ ,” was the first noise to escape her, a small acknowledgement of the physical hurt she had just inflicted upon herself - but nothing like what he had done, nowhere near what he had done to himself; _this_ would heal - and as soon as it had graced the cold night air it was followed by a wail, and then she was screaming. Screaming, screaming, _screaming_ as though a vocal manifestation of her anguish could bring him back to her; unwind time; lay his record bare and cut Ipswich out in the way that he had pulled out _his own organs oh god oh god oh god -_

She only realized that she had sunk to her knees when they hit the cobblestones below her, and then she only cradled her fractured hand to her chest and threw back her head to roar her loss into the dull silence of the night.

* * 

For a while the zombie just sat where he had been left, stunned again by his own new unpredictable aptitude toward violence. His body felt off, full of an emptiness that only could only be partially attributed to the fact that he had recently shed a large portion of his physical mass, so he lay back and replaced the towel over his eyes. It made it easier to pretend that he didn't exist.

William breathed, thanking any available higher power that he had not put his hand through a lung. It could have been much worse. He was still conscious, still as much himself as he had ever been since the incident, and the increase of the tendrils of numbness felt somewhat better than the warm putrescence that had sat at his core before.

It didn't hurt - and now, for that, he wondered if he should be glad. With Grell gone, his mind was uninhibited by the now near-constant desire to kill her, and he could simply _be_ as far as he could ignore the base urge to go out and find her again. He was dead. He'd come to terms with that already. He was going to die. That too had been inevitable for some time now.

How long had it been?

He couldn't remember.

This realization failed to install any fresh panic in him. It was as detached as anything else, now; it couldn't hold much significance anymore. He had been dead for a long time, and then more dead after that, and it was all beginning to run together into a horrible mess that was easier to ignore than attempt to disentangle at this point.

Rationally, many things were. It was easier not to think, except that when he drifted into periods without thought the other thing seemed to take over and that was always unpleasant.

So, on a whim and because he was aware that he was to blame, William decided to clean the remains of himself from the bathroom as best he could. It wouldn't be fair to force Grell to remove the innards of the man she loved from her own bath, especially given that he had turned on her again before she had left. How long ago had that been? It would not do to leave the task for too long. It would only distress her more to find him covered in blood again when she got back.

He stood, overbalanced due to the sudden loss of most of his centre of gravity, and then stood up again. Adjusting his glasses seemed a good thing to do, although it didn't help his vision. William frowned, partially at himself but mostly at the havering white obscurity that was beginning to encroach on the edges of his vision, and made his way back through to the bathroom.

The first thought to hit him upon re-entering the room was that it smelled as though something had died, and a hoarse laugh escaped him in retaliation for the notion. Of course something had died. _What a mess._

The bath looked much worse when viewed from this angle, William discovered, and overlaid with the acid stench of Grell's half-digested expulsion in the sink it really did reek. But his ability to scent was almost as diminished as his ability to see, currently, so it was bearable.

The zombie rolled up its sleeves, conscious of the clean whiteness of its shirt, and leaned over the bath. For a moment he held himself still, feeling a detached curiosity – how had all of this organic matter been crammed inside him, beneath the skin? How had it been able to fit? - but let it fall away as he reached up to turn the shower tap on again. The water felt as though it should have been cool, but splashed against him again at a temperature that failed to touch the nerves that lay dead beneath his skin. That didn't matter, though; it was not supposed to be touching him anyway. It was for the blood. 

William had never actually cleaned a bath before, as far as he could remember; dirt seemed to fail to find proper purchase on objects in the shinigami realm, and dust behaved in strange ways. But running a hand across the grime of the bath made it run puce and then off-white; dry blood returning to liquid more easily than he'd expected and disappearing down the plug in inky swirls of sick pink.

He didn't even realize he was soaked through so thoroughly again until he stood, unable to tell if the bath were clean or just evenly coated in grey dirt, and made the mistake of catching his own eye in the mirror.

_Good lord_.

William had managed to forget how dead he looked, and the spectre in the mirror seemed a shock. Pale, so very pale – he raised one hand just to be certain that it was indeed a mirror – and pallid with it, sunken cheeked and hollow-eyed. He looked haggard, inexcusably drained, and it was impossible to make out signs of life in those glassy eyes.

Unnerved, he adjusted his glasses and turned back to the task at hand. The organs – horribly solid, all too real – they had to go. Not down the plug – they wouldn't fit, not unless he juiced them – and they couldn't just be binned, either. That would be dreadfully unclean.

His eyes flicked to the toilet, to the organs and then to the toilet again.

_This is surreal._

Deciding that that would indeed be the best course of action – it was very unorthodox, but it would work fine, wouldn't it? - William took the time to actually catalogue at what was in the bath.

That had to be the remains of the liver, there, didn't it? The intestines were obvious, flaccid and burst, and the stomach seemed to have fared the worst of them all. The only thing that took him time to place was an organ rendered ambiguous through its obscurity rather than its level of desecration.

_Is that... Is that a warp core?_

He had never really considered that particular aspect of his anatomy – the only obviously inhuman piece in the body of a reaper – in any real physical terms before. He'd known he had one, because he had been able to jump from one plane to the next, but had never been given a physical description. He would probably considered it something small, unnoticeable in a body. Perhaps a little like an appendix.

The tissue was feathered and branched like a fern, paper-thin and ringed in ragged red patches marking the weeping spots by which it had been anchored inside him. Aside from those it was a very dull pink, almost grey, a shade above colourless.

It was also much, much larger than anything else in the bath. Although going by mass it must have been almost negligible, the thing's sheer spread area looked as though it could touch both sides of his torso with ease, and it almost cleared a foot in length.

All that had made him a reaper lay before him, stripped out by his own hand, and he felt nothing.

He felt nothing.


	11. Until it comes,

Grell hadn't been able to speak to him when she had returned, deep in the wee hours of the morning, due less to the fact that she found him asleep – curled up careless in his room, as though nothing were wrong at all – and more to her own emotions. 

It had taken an embarrassingly long time for her to console herself to a point where she'd had hold enough on herself that she wouldn't cry anymore, not that night and hey, maybe not ever again – and then she'd had to remove every ounce of ruined make-up from her face and reapply it, because the last thing she wanted was for Will to see her in such a state. It wasn't even in an attempt to allow him to not see her as unattractive anymore; she just didn't want him to know how moved she was. Didn't want his last impressions of her to be of weakness.

But he was asleep anyway, presumably exhausted by the bodily traumas he had inflicted upon himself, and she had removed her heels at the door and padded through to her own room without waking him.

The morning, when it came, was better. He awoke before she did and when she emerged from her room she found him at one of the front windows, watching the sun rise. He turned, a little jerkily, and curled one hand up in greeting before ignoring her again in favour of the sky.

_What are you thinking about, my dearest lost love?_

Her morning routine had adapted to her situation well, and what had once taken her an hour each day now barely ate up fifteen minutes. Hair, makeup, all aspects of clothing and any other small things needed for work, ensure everything is locked down properly, grab breakfast and go. Get out of the house as quickly as possible, always. Her hand was more than half healed, and to her relief he did not ask as to what had happened. Perhaps he didn't notice it at all.

“Bye, Will,” she said shortly when passing him again, her last task of each morning. “I'm off to work.”

The zombie swung round to face her slowly, legs apparently troubling his ability to move smoothly, and eyed her for a moment. And then, unexpectedly, he lifted his hand as though to touch her, fingers splayed wide in a clear gesture of longing.

She looked at him, caught the begging on his face and felt anguish break through hers, and hoped he couldn't see her momentous pity as she stepped backward and breathed an answer to the implicit plea. “Oh, Will... You know my greatest regret is being unable to touch you.”

The zombie's mouth thinned into a banner of tragic understanding, and she jumped away before his hurt ensnared her again.

The dispatch was quiet when she walked in – many of her colleagues were not here yet, and wouldn't be for a while yet. Heaven forbid they be on time; but she couldn't complain, given that that was an ideal that she herself had so recently adhered to.

Grell found herself a cup of tea, retreated into her own office and sat down to read through the day's invoices. 

First and foremost was simple note, clearly having been written hurriedly and at no length whatsoever.

_They're beginning to turn. Your presence is requested_ now _.  
Davies. _

What did she mean, _turn?_

Grell was down within seconds, flying through the door when she realized that today there was no secretary to greet her at all, and was met with chaos. 

There were about a dozen shinigami in the room, she reckoned, presumably the majority of the department's juniors – who stood frozen, watching wide-eyed as the zombies threw themselves against the bars of their cages like rabid animals. Some of them were shouting, releasing wordless utterances that were full of anger, and others made no sound but for the smacking of their dead flesh against their entrapments. Their hands scratched and groped at the air before them, reaching out toward the reapers with clear bloodthirsty intent, but they couldn't get through the bars.

This seemed to be pissing them off.

“Grell!”

The shout came from Davies, at the forefront of her team, and she beckoned Grell closer. “What happened?”

“We don't know! We came in this morning to find them like this – they can't reason, they can't understand what we are saying, they can't talk – we can't get near them. They're _zombies_ , Ms Sutcliff, they're dead – the Ipswich zombies are lost to us.”

Grell stared at them, and at the zombies, and struggled to put voice to the fresh turmoil in her mind. “No,” she managed, very faintly, and then, “Why did you call me here?”

“We needed someone with a scythe,” Davies said, and then caught her expression. “No – it's the ones that haven't turned, the ones that were the Collections administrators – we need to get them out; and to do so we need a deterrent toward attacking us. They're still in their right frames of mind, just about – we need to relocate them before we kill these ones.”

Surveying the zombies again, Grell found that she was right; there were those who stood still, or as far back as they could go, cowering away from the violence of their peers. In most distress was evident – but some just stood and watched, indifferent. 

Retrieving them reminded her of the clear blue day, even though the circumstance was wholly different and this time she was surrounded by very awake if slightly less mobile creatures that wanted to kill her, and she released them from their prisons only to hand them over to the people who bound them up secure around arms and mouths so that they could pose no danger. They were surprisingly docile; surprisingly fearful, although whether of her or their own obvious incoming conclusion she couldn't tell. 

They were led out like sheep into a much smaller second hall with fewer cells, designated a space between two and then left to their own devices. Davies seemed certain that they wouldn't hurt each other - “None of them did before,” she pointed out with a shrug – and requested that Grell leave.

“Why?”

“I don't want you to see me do this.”

“Do what?” The question was absolutely redundant, because they both knew what she intended to do. But Grell was determined to be obtuse about it, because even a half dozen reaper's lives were heavy on the hand; that there were a hundred or more in that room waiting for the curtain to fall made her sick.

“They aren't themselves anymore,” murmured Davies. “They're just monsters, Grell. We can do nothing more than send them on their way now.”

“What about the three you operated on?”

“Dead,” she replied shortly. “Tore out their own hearts.”

Grell hesitated, and then half-heartedly offered her help, which was refused. “They're my responsibility,” was the distracted reason given by the Special Affairs administrator. “They're my responsibility. Go.”

“How long do you think..?”

“A day? Two, three? A week at most. We don't know the exact time period between when the infection began to set in at Ipswich and when the Collections lot found them; we don't know if there's any difference between primary and secondary infections, we don't know. We don't _know_! Please, just go. Go! I'll send you word of any further incidents I think merit your attention.”

Grell looked at her, opened her mouth to speak, and then went.

* *

_Grell Sutcliff,_

_First of all, I wish to state explicitly that this letter is no confession of love nor anything of that ilk, although I suppose I cannot fault you if you choose to take it as such to ease your own distress at my situation. This letter is merely an apology, and I'm sorry that it can be nothing more._

_I know I have never been friendly with you, in any sense of the word. I know that I have perhaps been harsher than is justifiable to you on occasion, and short with you, and restrictive. But then again, you were no ideal colleague yourself._

_You must forgive me for any trailing thought; this is written in isolated periods of coherency on my part, so it may not all exactly flow so well. Too often I cannot write at all._

_I can feel what's left of my humanity slipping away. It is deeply unpleasant, ~~and I~~_

_Sorry. I broke off. I cannot recall what I intended to say._

_It's funny, how different you are now. Did I do that to you, being like this, or have you always been so quiet when not trying to win my attentions? It's unfortunate ~~that~~ that such a thing has come to light only now. ~~You see~~_

_I always believed that you were solely fixated on acquiring my body for your pleasure, but now I stand stagnating and I do not believe that even you can fantasize yourself away from this reality. You  
took me under your wing when it would have been easier and safer and more pleasant for you to let me rot alone, which you would not have done had you just been a colleague, and equally would not have done if your only intention was to bed me._

_It is bittersweet to only realize this now. I should have  
discussed the issue with you in a rational manner instead of letting it fly loose as it did, with misinformation on both behalves._

_I doubt we could ever have been as close as you wished, but I should not have been so destructive toward you and you should not have been so warm toward me_  
 ~~I am not using warm as a positive word~~  
And now I cannot speak to you anymore, about that or anything else. I am sorry that I am having to write this out for you instead of telling you myself. It is very impersonal, but then perhaps I am a very impersonal being in nature. 

_I am coming to realize many things about myself as my mind works itself loose. You would not believe, Grell, what I've found in here._

_None of it is important._

_Sometimes I forget  
who you are, that you are a person I know. You are split cleanly in my mind; for the most part you are yourself, and I am grateful, but sometimes you are nothing more than a stranger without a name. These times are bad._

_Did I sound articulate when I used to speak? I can't remember one way or another, but it feels as though my ability to find the right words to show what I mean has fallen between then and now._

_I just wanted to say that I am sorry for every cruel word that I said to you, for every time I hit you, for every time I put you down. I will not say that you did not deserve some of them, but I should not have resorted to those means to control you. I can't actually  
remember most of these events as individual points in time, but an impression of their entirety hovers over me._

_~~You were~~ _

_I am grateful that you are here for me. Had our roles been reversed, I would not have done the same for you. That said, had our roles been reversed I believe you may well have survived Ipswich and not needed anything from me at all._

_But here we are._

_I want you to know that I am in no pain and little distress, and I shall pass at ease if not easily._

_I should not have let my innards get all over your bathroom. That was a mistake. You shouldn't have had to see that. I imagine it was rather unpleasant for you._

_~~I don't~~ _

_Sorry._

_Do not mourn for me._

He signed the letter as best he could, then folded it up and considered the paper at length before slipping it under the pillows of the couch. 

There were things he hadn't told her, of course. It wouldn't be fair to tell her that he had reconsidered her, reconsidered everything, and found that he could feel for her – both because it was too late to act upon any feeling whatsoever and because he didn't know whether it was himself that felt that or merely the breakdown of some chemical inside him, something else contaminated by the spreading sickness he held. It wouldn't be fair to explain to her the vast intricacies of his decaying mind, innumerable and unfathomable as they were, and to tell her what he wanted of her would be folly.

The warring of his mind was fogged and strange, and affected his ability to reason.

He had caught himself staring at her lips more than once, scrutinizing the way that they formed each syllable so perfectly and pursed and stretched to release them, letting her lilting voice fill the air between them quick, quick, too fast in her words for him to have time to muster complete answers before further words flowed forth. They were beautiful, her subtle inflections and unconscious movements, and he found himself marvelling at the fact that he had never noticed them before. For the first time in his life – or at least, he thought it was the first time; his sieve memory disallowed such concrete statements as that – he was finding her explicitly and overwhelmingly attractive.

All desire to hurt her was gone, replaced by a sick, tender yearning for her presence far closer to his than would be prudent. He wanted to caress her skin, feel the structure of her ambiguous body under his hands; touch lips to her cheek, her mouth, her neck. He wanted to hear her breath hitch at his proximity, feel her radiance, her joy.

When he took her and made her as his equal, as he would, of course he would - how could he not? - he would not break her in the way that he himself had been shattered by the carelessness of those who had ruined him. He would not destroy her strong figure, or mar that gorgeous white skin. She was beautiful, and he would not betray that beauty to sate his own hunger. 

He would beckon her close, perhaps, call her in and croon what was perhaps a perfect parody of love and perhaps not, and take her in his arms to brush her hair back from her pale skin before lowering his mouth to her neck, gentle, gentle. She would not feel pain as he made the incision, quick and singular, and he would kiss her until her heart stopped fluttering and she was like him. He would cradle her close to his own cold corpse as she died and lived again, again.

Grell would not disagree; he knew that. It was a certainty. How could she? He could not bear to be so alone; to listen to her clockbeat heartwork as it wound him mad knowing that it was the only wall between them. She would see that it was the only logical conclusion, she had to – she would be understanding, and kind, and lie back and allow what passed for lust to be sated through her bleeding power-cut of life and she would see, she would know, that it would be better like that.

He had to have her company, he had to. She was too bright alive; too fast. He needed her to slow down, to experience what it meant to be truly, honestly dead. 

Would she shudder as she bled out, jolt and shake as her body shut down? Reapers could heal wounds so very well – would it have time to seal before the infection set in, under the skin, safely packaged away, secure? Perhaps she would look perfect then, unblemished, and there would be no way to say if the rot was eating her insides out or not.

Of course she would.

William pressed his forehead into his palm, feeling its soft solidity, and let out a very soft moan born of pain and confusion. He didn't know Grell, not as well as he pretended, not as well as she pretended. And something – something ticking, something with glasses and the memory of a beating heart – something inside him abhorred his conscious, berated him for his bestial desire to savage her for his own selfish need for company. It sat heavy in his chest, the shredded remnants of what had called itself a conscience, and spat bile at him when he tried to ignore it. Was it him? Was he it? Was it the zombie, muttering and mangling its own intentions, or was it him, and all higher thought the condition's webbed wings? He had no idea. He couldn't tell which was right, nor which was moral, nor which was in a position to know.

It hurt, ached in a way that had nothing to do with pain, because he was here and there and nowhere and he could feel his seams pulling slowly apart. He knew his name, now – it was William – but wasn't certain if it was worth more than its weight on his tongue anymore. Could a name be anything more than a marking for a headstone when the one who wore it had waxed so hollow?

He wanted Grell to be here, soft, close, so that he could hold her tight and comforting against him, and bury himself in her hair, and let himself drown in her scent.


	12. the end,

She could feel him watching her.

It was worrying, especially in light of the imminence of his encroaching loss of control. His eyes were dim but not quite unfocused; some of their sharp intensity had returned to them from when he had misplaced it earlier on in his undead period, and she didn't know whether this made her glad or uneasy. He watched her as she entered rooms and left them; followed her around the room with his dead gaze as she moved. Sometimes she had the uncanny feeling that he could see her even when they were in different rooms; feel her heartbeat calling him more temptingly than her voice ever had.

He had stopped communicating with her entirely now, although sometimes he would open his mouth and groan or mutter some gargled expulsion that she could make not head or tail of. The notepad was gone, as Will had taken it up and methodically shredded it into the smallest pieces he could, page by page, disinterest on his corpse's features. Grell had no idea whether this was to signal that he explicitly did not want to speak to her or if he had forgotten entirely what paper was for.

It was impossible to gauge what he was thinking; how unbalanced he was but for the pigment in his eyes. It swayed, varied; flared off-green on some days and remained stuck grey for the rest. But they weren't infallible, these indicators of his health – sometimes green days were more volatile than grey.

She gave him a rabbit, and this time round he made no motion to dissuade her from watching him rip it apart and press its bleeding, twitching body between his jaws, piece by piece. The creature screamed and kicked at the violence of his teeth and disembowelling hands, jerky but horribly sure, and its red innards spilled out over his arms right before she heard the audible crack of his skull being split.

His blank eyes turned to her when he had finished, and for one cold moment she thought he intended to stand, lurch forth and tear into her in the same way – but he only stared at her, distantly unreadable, before crudely wiping his stained mouth with an equally smeared wrist and pulling his legs up close to his body; leaning over onto his side, gazing out into nothing as he digested the flesh.

She knew that he was dying, and she had almost accepted that – but it was the fact that she could do nothing to help him either way that hurt her so much.

*

His thoughts slithered and slipped within his eggshell mind, beating against his skull, their wings unable to breach the barrier between his mind and his mouth. Each snippet of clarity was engulfed and regurgitated by the crying black mass that squatted in the cesspit pool at the base of his cranium, sucking bits of his conscious in and spewing them out damaged beyond recognition. They skittered and scratched away at the edge of his self, except that he didn't have a self, and couldn't remember what a self was. He was a body, malnourished and breaking, and perhaps to eat – to _consume,_ not to eat, he didn't need to eat, he merely needed a heart, beating, beating, he needed to take a heart into himself in place of the one he lacked and then perhaps would he be able to hold his thoughts in something deeper than this shallow basin that they slopped over the edge of, careless, because if he had a heart he would be whole again?

He couldn't see. His eyes popped and swam, all externality blurred beyond recognition with glasses or without them, white voids throbbing there, there, there across the path of what could only jokingly be called vision, and for the first time in an eternity his head _hurt_ , the ache as blinding as the dizzying mess of his sight. The visual disability irritated him more than anything, because it was everywhere, and eventually he solved it by tearing a strip from his shirt and tying it around his eyes.

The white spots burned like suns through the comforting darkness of the blindfold, and for a time the zombie merely stood and breathed, vacant, reassured by the blank blackness in place of the myriad of shifting, bleeding colours that had paraded before him previously.

Breathing felt disgusting. His throat shuddered and caught as he fought to draw the breaths in, matted in the phlegm that had swamped the back of his mouth. Had it always been like this? Surely not. Surely nothing could live like this.

Live?

His other senses were no more help than his sight. He couldn't tell if he were completely deaf or if the problem was merely that everything around him was silent; he had tried to speak, to cry out, to make any noise at all, but had no idea whether the sound was managing to push out past the constriction of his airways. There was nothing in his mouth for him to taste other than the tacky dry edges of its roof and the slime of the mucus, but neither held any real substance. Scent had abandoned him long ago. He couldn't feel. He could touch walls and not tell whether they were made of silk or thorns; press his hands against his own face and only know that there was any contact at all because he couldn't move them further. He didn't know where he was, or how he'd got there, or how long he had been there; he knew nothing for certain. He didn't know if he ever had.

The only faint conviction that worked away at him was that there was nothing to ~~kill~~ eat, here, but that there would be. He didn't know how he knew this, but the faintest traces of memory brushed cool, unfeeling fingers across the membrane of his being; there had been a heartbeat here. He had not been responsible for its departure. It would be back.

He would take it, and it would be his, and he would regain his self.

The worn husk of a reaper stood in the hall of the home belonging to what had been his oldest - his only? - remaining friend, and waited.

* * *

It was immediately obvious that something was wrong as soon as Grell stepped into her house. It was in the air, that echoing stillness that had no place inside an inhabited building; it was in the silence that she was so used to now but that still felt so unnatural.

She called his name, unnerved, and heard the slinking footsteps from the living room at the same moment as the notes on the wall caught her eye - or rather, the lack of the notes on the wall caught her eye.

**I AM GOING TO DIE** , screamed the black mess across the open wallpaper. **GET OUT**

There was a noise, and a movement from the corner of her peripheral vision, and oh god oh god surely that was not Will.

The zombie seemed to fill the corridor with its hunching form, stooping slightly on those limping legs that seemed now to carry the weight of a monster instead of a man. Its head hung lax, moving a little as though attempting to pinpoint her location or prevent restlessness, and its hands did the same – clenching and unclenching into fists, nails digging into the palms with enough force that with every motion they punctured the palm's flesh and let minute rivulets of brackish blood seep from him, running over his discoloured skin.

The worst thing was the blindfold over his eyes, because they removed the last aspect of humanity from his visage and portrayed him as a beast. She couldn't see what colour if any lurked hidden behind its folds; couldn't tell what he was thinking. Had he tied the thing out of a desire to prevent himself from being able to attack her? How much of his conscious remained aware behind that black shroud?

Even though she knew it was coming she wasn't ready for how fast he moved, lunging forward with a snarl that seemed to reverberate through her even as she summoned her scythe and swung it round protectively in front of herself. “Don't get any closer – I will kill you; you know I will!”

And then he was upon her, barrelling into her as though his blind intent was to run straight through her, his body shoving the teeth of the chainsaw between them both as carelessly as though he couldn't feel it. If she were to pull the throttle...

She didn't. Taking the sudden proximity as an opportunity, Grell grabbed the fabric over the zombie's face and tore it free. “ _Will_!”

William – was it fair to call him that anymore, though? - jerked backward at the action, eyes wide and glazed in the light. They were hideous; fog grey and blood-shot, his pupils were dilated further than could be considered natural and full of an animalistic viciousness that she had only ever seen before in the eyes of hunger-crazed demons and rabid dogs.

He wasn't in there. 

But the zombie was, its fetid breath harsh on her face and its fractured strength pushing against her even as it hands clawed back at her, that relentless viciousness so much more deadly than any weapon wielded by a sane individual. Grell pulled back, ducked, and hit him with as much force as she could behind the blade of the chainsaw. It barely fazed him; the backward stumble only removed him from her for a moment before he sprang immediately back, apparently infuriated.

Grell had lied. She couldn't kill him – he was William, her William, the man she had grown up and flowered beside and loved, she loved him - 

She loved who he had been - 

_You are in love with a man who is no longer here._

She raised the chainsaw sharply against his arms as he reached her again, failing to stop as though he felt he could walk straight through this metal barrier, and his dead eyes stared sightless straight through her as he fought to get closer, his determination threatening to overcome her strong sense of self-preservation -

She wondered if he heard the scream of the motor, and if he did, if he knew what it meant in those slit heartbeats in which he died again.


	13. again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heck schedules, I'm finishing this now. Hopefully you've enjoyed (if that's the right word?) reading this.

There had been nothing romantic about William's death. The scatter-dot artwork created by her blade was defunct because it was from _his_ body, making it pain and not beauty, and in any case his blood was thin and paler than any shade she could appreciate. The way she had held him in her arms as he'd hyperventilated out his last strands of life through two mutilated lungs had not been poetic, and his eyes – his staring, water-clear eyes – had registered nothing but terrified bewilderment at the sudden reality of an end point. No recognition, not acceptance, no anger.

He had been confused.

She had held onto him until he went still, and then for a little longer after that, too, just to be certain. She'd closed his eyes and dabbed at the blood around his mouth with her glove.

And then Grell had stood and let him fall, acutely aware that she was saturated in his blood – fluid, the contaminant – and stripped all outer layers of her clothes from herself, placing them over the twisted wreck of his body. She'd phoned Special Affairs, who were in a panic due to the unexpected brutality from their own turning zombies, and they had advised her in shouts to wash everything from herself as best she could, and report in to them as soon as possible.

Showering felt like a betrayal, that she could wash the events that had just transpired from her skin with soap where he lay cold and still in pieces in her hall, and Grell rubbed and scratched at herself and watched the dull mucus-brown of his blood seep off her and away.

It took some time before she realized that there had been no reels, no soul, at which point the room seemed to spin and shatter around her as she considered the breathless significance of the thing.

He wasn't alive. She had killed him, with a finality that even an undead could not recover from. He'd stopped breathing.

But his soul wasn't there; not a single frame.

That made sense, she supposed, numb. That was why he had lost his mind, his consciousness, his memories. He had lost his soul during the spreading sickness of zombiehood, piece by piece. That was how it worked.

When she arrived in Special Affairs for a check over the next day they confirmed that no patient of theirs who had turned had retained any trace of a soul; five zombies were left half conscious, those who had been bitten by or after the Ipswich zombies, and two that had turned were retained for study. Mindless, dead things.

Grell tried not to see them as she passed.

Wearing black to the funeral – en mass, the burial of the ashes of eighty-six reapers who had died on that last day – had been the only course of action she could allow herself to take, but still it didn't feel like respect. There was one grave, and a logbook of names instead of a headstone.

'Miss Sutcliff' was asked to create a eulogy for William T Spears, politely, as she was to formally replace his now truly vacated position in the department. Ms Sutcliff declined, politely, aware both that she had only been asked due to the fact that nobody else had held any feeling whatsoever toward Will and that if she should speak it, even to those who had known him, she would be the only one to appreciate what was lost.

It was assumed that nobody had known Will as well as Grell had, but she could not help but feel that she had never known him at all.

When Davies called her back down, down the familiar steps to a department that she never wanted to set foot in again – never wanted to even think about again – Grell almost ignored the summons entirely. She had too much paperwork, and too many memories.

But the promise of information was not without temptation, sour though it was, so she followed through; and Davies was waiting in an office, the only one in Special affairs, clean and sterile. There were files strewn across the desk, and a microscope – each file was stamped with a name, awaiting the correct paperwork to fill it, reporting each lost soul in neat rows, doomed to be shut away in boxes and forgotten.

“There you are,” she said by way of greeting, and waved Grell in. “We isolated the problem; too late, but I thought you'd be interested to know what it was.

Grell listened without hearing, and nodded in the gaps.

“...we found a high concentration of corrodents in their bodies – centred in their central nervous systems, but mainly clustered at the highest point of the spinal cord; just at the base of the brain – and believe that to be both what kept their corpses intact but lead to the acceleration of the decay of their minds. At first we thought they were some sort of pathogens, but... Well. Take a look.”

Davies stepped back, and waved a hand at the microscope. Grell looked blankly at it, and then at her, and then bent to peer down at the things that had killed William.

At first she couldn't make it out, the machine on the plate – but then it moved, minutely, and its form became clear. A tiny body, square, and two very small blades; scissor-jaws. They opened and closed sporadically, and Grell pulled away.

“What is it made of?” she asked, the question redundant as soon as it had left her lips. What else could it be made of?

“Their bodies are silicon and cadmium, mostly, more advanced than anything we should have for decades yet – but their jaws are made of scythe shards. They just - cut away, bit by bit, and we can only assume that the frames that they take serve to power them. Certainly they are not retained.”

“They are robots.”

“...You could define them as such, I suppose. Although-”

“This was murder.”

“Yes.”

“I know who did this.”

Davies went very still. “Who? You must tell Upper Management - they-”

“I will deal with this.” 

All traces of grief had flown – something cold settled over Grell, something new. There was suddenly no room for remorse; no room for self-pity, and certainly no time for mourning. Will was dead – William T Spears was _gone_ , against his own will, and Grell could avenge him.

Grell would avenge him.

* * * *

_The first touch had been a kiss._

_She had introduced herself as Monica Cameron, this time; a temporary substitute moved over from Brighton. There had been no real reason as to why Ipswich had drawn the short end of the straw – it was a small branch, and laid back enough that they didn't go into any detail when checking her credentials. Within days Ms Cameron was well known and liked, and within a week she had managed to curry favour with one of the more flirtatious collections agents and within a fortnight she had watched as he had started to show signs of aggression, absent mindedness, misunderstanding. And then she had left, before the weight of her own contamination became too much._

_It would have been nice, she thought, to have been able to remain in Ipswich and watch her experiment unfold. It would have been useful to be amongst them as they were each affected in turn, first through innocent gestures – any expression of intimacy from her susceptible victim, even coughs, the sharing of drinks – and then through the violence, the hunger that she had felt even then. But she had remained in control, long enough to make her getaway – and now she was here._

_Megan Keanes Moira Kay Monica Cameron; a thousand names twisted and spiralled within her mind, tormenting each other in circles. She breathed, erratic and painful breaths, and wished that the rot would consume her faster, kill her quickly. It had been designed to be so thorough, not to miss a thing – but god, did it ache._

_She couldn't remember where she was. She couldn't remember what she had been doing, or what year it was, or what her name was. She couldn't remember if she was alone, if she was human or reaper or dead or demon; she couldn't remember if she was supposed to cry._

_The only thing she knew – the only single truth in her corroded, convoluted conscious – was that when she awoke, everything would be better._

_Everything would be better again._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So! There we go.  
> There will be either one or - more likely - two further stories in this series, but as for when they'll be... Well, your guess is as good as mine. I have started both, and know vaguely how they will go, but unfortunately have run right into a block and also have exams far closer than is welcome. It may be June or later before I post anything at all again. Sorry about that.  
> Thank you for reading; comments/feedback would be more than welcome! Suggests for how the overall plot should go would be oppertune now rather than later, as everything in future is as of yet unfixed bar the ending :>


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